McCain is engaged in chicanery. He's a favorite of the media because of the quality of his soundbites, not because of the integrity of his actions. McCain was recently properly skewered on C-SPAN's Book Notes program:
booknotes.org
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WHEELER: Calling Senator John McCain an enabler of pork.
LAMB: An enabler of pork?
WHEELER: Uh-huh.
LAMB: Actually, after this morning -- this is being recorded in late September, but I got on the Web site of Senator McCain and got a statement from him on September the 20th. And I just -- I wanted to read it to you because I thought maybe it would give you a chance to comment on it. It says -- this is about -- He says, "Mr. President, I support passage of fiscal year 2005 Military Construction Appropriations Act. This bill provides $10 billion in funding for important military construction. Amazingly, this report contains only 35 earmarks, totaling $44.7 million, which is significantly less than the approximately $80 million in unauthorized earmarks contained in last year`s appropriations bill."
He goes on to call it a clean bill. He congratulates the chairman, Senator Hutchinson, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and Senator Feinstein, the ranking member of the subcommittee, on and on. And he says it`s $44.7 million, down from $80 million. What do you hear -- what are all the things we`re hearing here, earmarks, the Military Construction Appropriations Act, and Senator McCain congratulating them.
WHEELER: We can talk about it at some point. He conveys the impression that things are getting better as far as pork and congressional defense authorizations and appropriations bills. That`s not correct. He counted himself $8.9 billion in the DoD appropriations bill for the other 95 percent of the Defense Department, beyond the military construction budget. That`s a world record. That`s the most they`ve ever jammed into a DoD appropriations -- Department of Defense appropriations bill. And that`s his count.
LAMB: That`s $80 billion?
WHEELER: No, no, $8.9 billion.
LAMB: I`m sorry. All right. But let me stop -- define what pork is.
WHEELER: The public understanding of pork is bad stuff that Congress stuffs into bills, including defense appropriations bills and authorizations bills. That public -- that`s a misunderstanding of the process in what pork really is. There might be some stuff of that $8.9 billion put into the DoD appropriations bill that was a good idea. There`s probably stuff that`s a bad idea. The point is, nobody knows.
The cost of it, short and long-term, hasn`t been assessed by the Congressional Budget Office. There`s been no truly objective analysis of whether that idea or that project or that parking garage, even, is really needed or whether it`s needed more in Alaska or in Rhode Island. There`s no independent assessment whether that thing is a good idea. Some of them are patently, you know, obviously, you know, lousy ideas. Section 81.13, stuffed in the back of the DoD appropriations bill, appropriates about $50 million for museums, a parade ground at a closed military base, stuff like that added. That might be acceptable in peacetime. In wartime, that`s not acceptable behavior, to my way of thinking.
LAMB: Well, take for instance (UNINTELLIGIBLE) lives way away from here. Lincoln, Nebraska -- I don`t know, pick your small town around the United States, and they`ve just seen an announcement in the newspaper that Senator X announces the building of a museum in the town, federal money. And they -- they don`t -- doesn`t say where it comes from, but here comes $25 million to build something. Isn`t that good for that community?
WHEELER: They`re not getting the whole story. They`re not getting the story of where that $25 million might be spent, if that museum weren`t being built. They`re not getting the story of what`s being tapped in the DoD budget to pay for that. And they`re not being informed about how good DoD pork is in really generating jobs.
One of the things I did for Senator Domenici to try to slow down the pork parade a little bit was to get a GAO study on just how many jobs these projects generated in New Mexico for him. The result was something of a shocker. Many of the projects that he was supporting and urging Senator Stevens and Senator Warner and Senator Thurmond to support, because it helped New Mexico, generated zero jobs in New Mexico. Some of them generated tiny numbers of jobs, 10, 15 jobs.
In some cases, the money was just passing through a corporate facility in New Mexico, on its way somewheres else. The big job generators were the military bases. Those were tens of thousands of people. But a lot of these other projects were tiny. The impression that members of Congress have is these are big deal job generators. If you want to generate jobs, do a roads project, don`t do a military contract.
LAMB: Go back to what you said about Senator McCain being a pork enabler.
WHEELER: Yes.
LAMB: I mean, he has a Web site, and it lists all the pork of the members, and he gets up in the Senate, as you say, and gives speeches and points fingers. Why is he an enabler, then?
WHEELER: Because he doesn`t do anything. He gives a great speech. He`s got a staffer who counts this stuff. They use consistent criteria. Their criteria are pretty modest, but they`re consistent, at least. So he has a track record in defense and other legislation as to what`s been going on for about -- oh, almost 10 years.
My problem is that after he gives his speech, he sits down, walks away and does nothing. He has the sense and the wisdom to appreciate that this stuff is a bad idea and it`s hurting our military. It`s not just a waste of money, it`s hurting the military. But then he -- in a parliamentary institution specifically designed to let the minority, even one senator, throw the body into legislative agony until he gets some kind of accommodation -- I`m not just talking about filibusters. There`s many things a member of Congress can do to inflict parliamentary pain on a body that is doing these kinds of things until he gets some form of accommodation. He consistently doesn`t do that.
In June, 2002, he came close. He started opposing some projects in a bill. He got whipped. The arguments against him were ludicrous, but they served the very good purpose of exposing just how flimsy the arguments were in favor of these ideas. But then he gave up. He said, I`m going to throw up various parliamentary hurdles to make this real painful for you guys, even though you`ve got the votes. He didn`t keep that promise. He walked away from it.
As a matter of fact, during that process, where he was going through this public exercise of doing the right thing and making threats about, I`m going to inflict this pain, a quiet process was going on that you could only see hints of if you were sitting in the chamber in the public gallery. But as a staffer, I was able to observe it much more closely and understand fully what was going on.
What was going on was that he was being -- he and his staff were being shown all of these amendments, and he was either approving or disapproving them, saying, I don`t -- you know, This one`s OK with me, this one`s not OK with me. In other words, while he was complaining about the process, he was participating in the process. He was culling out amendments that -- in that particular parliamentary situation were non-germane. They were in a filibuster -- excuse me -- they were in a cloture situation. Other times on other bills, he would call out amendments that transgressed the jurisdiction of the -- of his committee, the Commerce Committee. And those would get called out, but all the rest would continue.
LAMB: You`re using language that might be confusing. For instance, what`s non-germane mean?
WHEELER: When the -- when somebody threatens to filibuster to prolong proceedings simply by talking, the Senate can shut that up by going through a process of what`s called a cloture motion. If 60 senators approve that motion, debate is limited to 30 hours and amendments can only be germane. What that means, that the amendment can only address a subject matter already in the bill.
And in that particular situation, in July, 2002, McCain had the good sense to ask the parliamentarian, Is this amendment germane, when a porky, non-germane amendment was being proposed. And the parliamentarian is a staffer who makes these kinds of official adjudications, and so they were calling out the amendments that added pork to new subject matters to the bill. The ones that were adding pork in old subject matters of the bill proceeded.
LAMB: All right. You never have been to Washington. You`re interested in how your money is being spent. You`re watching C-Span`s coverage of the Senate and the House. What are they not seeing? And how if -- you`re watching and they`re not seeing -- how can they find out, for instance, about pork items?
WHEELER: Yes. It`s -- what C-Span does I think is very important. In the `80s, there was a lot of debate in Congress about whether it would make things worse or better to have the proceedings televised. And in a sense, it made things worse because there`s lots more sort of posturing and a lot less debate than there used to be.
But watching the floor proceedings is a great place to start. You can see Senator McCain give his speech detailing these items and characterize them, I think, you know, properly. Then you`ll see what doesn`t happen. You`ll see him sit down. Nobody else engages him. Nobody else says, Well, my -- you know, my amendment is too a good idea, and here`s why. They pass over it and move on to the next senator who`s got a prepared speech and wants to read it off.
So in a sense, you`ve got to listen to what is being said and then pay attention to what`s not being said. Even if you`re not, you know, skilled in all this complex parliamentary gobbledygook, if you see a member say something is a terrible idea and something should be done about it and then sit down and walk away, you`re seeing what you understand as somebody who`s declaring themselves, saying it`s unacceptable, and then doing nothing about it.
LAMB: Is it possible to get a list, as the years go on, of where the pork is? And how soon can you get it after it`s passed?
WHEELER: Best place to go is John McCain`s Web site. They stopped listing the speeches on older bills, but you can go there and get his speeches on this year or last year`s and the year before`s various bills, defense and otherwise. And go to the "pork busters" box on the upper right-hand corner of his Web site and read on. You`ll see in some of those speeches long lists, page after page of the several hundred items in a bill that nobody really knows what they are, but they`re being added because some member wants them.
LAMB: Do the members, when they vote on the floor of the Senate, know they`re voting on all these?
WHEELER: No. They`re adopted by a voice vote, without members being recorded one way or the other. A voice vote is -- there could be five members in the chamber, and the presiding officer says, Those in favor, say aye, and you hear a mumble, And those opposed say no, and you hear a low -- you hear silence or you know, one or two saying, you know, no. And that`s it. They`re not described. They`re certainly not debated.
My experience is that members who have their own amendments, even their staff often don`t fully comprehend what their -- what their thing is. You`ll see letters that the members send to the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and in the case of military pork, the authorization committee chairman, Warner and ranking member Senator Levin. And these letters will go on for pages and pages, and they`ll have 20, 50 to 100 items in them, each one described in a paragraph maybe a third or half a page long. Those descriptions are usually scripted by the manufacturer or the Defense Department project manager, who`s stuffing it into the budget behind the secretary of defense`s back.
Not all staffers even understand what these things really are. The vast majority don`t understand the arguments against the item. They don`t call up CBO or CRS or GAO, where there`s...
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