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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (47228)	11/16/2010 10:09:11 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Means To An End To Big Spending Posted 06:50 PM ET Fiscal Restraint: Thanks to the rise of the Tea Party, a key debate within the victorious GOP has changed. The question is no longer whether to cut spending, but how. The big test for Republicans after their historic victory is not whether they can work with President Obama and take part in "governing." It's whether they can maintain long-term credibility as spending hawks. Think of the Tea Party as the long-suffering wife of the Republican Party, with its own history of Democrat-like spending addiction. Republicans may claim they are a Grand New Party, clean and sober in the aftermath of the big-spending Bush years. But the wife's patience is wearing thin, she is watching hubby like a hawk, and she has a bag packed and placed beside the front door. It's in that context that various conservative Republicans are competing to be seen as the most frugal lawmaker of them all. The House of Representatives already has a ban on the infamous practice of earmarks — local pet projects that members of Congress arrange to have financed federally. In the wake of the election, serious conservative senators such as Jim DeMint, R-S.C., are demanding such a ban in their chamber. With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., against him, DeMint looks like the personification of the Tea Party revolting against the GOP's old guard. And as far as John Q. Public is concerned — whether he's a Tea Partyer or not — the practice looks sleazy and stopping it seems reasonable. DeMint considers it symbolically crucial, arguing that Congress will never reform its massive, bankruptcy-destined entitlement programs while lawmakers can cater to their own parochial interests. With a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of nearly 90%, however, McConnell is far from a Republican In Name Only. In resisting DeMint, he warns that banning earmarks won't cut any spending. And worse, it would shift legislative appropriation powers to President Obama. The heavy lifting against banning earmarks is being done by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who spent nine lonely years fighting the political establishment, including many Republicans, on global warming, finally finding himself vindicated last year by ClimateGate. The National Journal's "Most Conservative Senator" of 2009 says every single one of the famous "102 worst ways the government is spending your tax dollars" highlighted by Fox News' Sean Hannity was a presidential, not congressional, earmark. The list includes $2 million for miniature flying robot bees in Massachusetts and $1 million to study the division of labor in ant colonies in Arizona. The senator points to a Hill newspaper report that found lobbyists gravitating toward executive branch bureaucrats instead of senators and congressmen for spending favors. He notes that earmarks accounted for only 1.5% of all discretionary spending last year. Inhofe says earmarks gave U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq improved armor and financed the anti-terrorist Predator drone, both items he says would never have been funded by Presidents Obama and Bush. Writing in National Review last week, Inhofe said the Obama stimulus "famously did not contain a single congressional" earmark, yet ended up funding "hundreds of frivolous items such as a clown show in Pennsylvania, studying the mating decisions of the female cactus bug, and a helicopter able to detect radioactive rabbit droppings, to name a few." On Monday, Inhofe introduces a bill on the Senate floor he promises will solve the whole earmark imbroglio. It would phase in over five years a freeze on discretionary spending at fiscal-year 2008 levels for all "nonsecurity" appropriations. Reminiscent of the Gramm-Rudman law in the 1980s — the one spending control mechanism that worked (until it was dismantled) — Inhofe's bill would have the teeth of an across-the-board sequester mechanism. Sixty-seven senators would have to vote against the sequester to disarm it. Emergency military and disaster relief spending would be exempt. Inhofe says it would save $634 billion more than enacting Obama's proposed spending freeze by 2020, and close to $900 billion more than doing nothing. Welcome to the great debate on how to cut spending in the Obama era. Whoever wins — DeMint or Inhofe — the long-overdue realization that the fiscal chickens have come home to roost is, thankfully, here to stay. investors.com