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Politics as usual with anti-pork bill
By David Paul Brown
Paradise (Calif.) Post
September 7, 2006
Most people would agree with implementing more transparency as to how our elected officials vote. Their votes tell us their beliefs and priorities as to both laws involving behavior and ones involving spending.
We need to know if they've compromised or why they may have changed their mind. Do they genuinely have new information? Have they had a change of heart or some epiphany? Did someone write them a check to change their mind or say I'll vote for your bill if you'll vote for mine?
Politics is the art of compromise and what one man calls wasteful spending (pork) another may call necessary. This is where politics is always a bit dicey, and clearly not black and white. What's borderline illegal to one is "Our congressman is just doing his job taking care of us. It's our tax dollars and he/she is making sure we get our fair share back from Washington D.C."
Books have been written on how to do this well and some do it better than others. One thing we can all agree on is to the extent possible, we'd like to know what our elected leaders are doing with our money and in our name.
Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama, a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat respectively, have crafted legislation to do just that and 18 senators have co-sponsored the bill (SB 2590.)
Porkbusters.org reported last week one senator was trying to jettison the bill by invoking an arcane Senate rule. This rule puts a "hold" on the bill, stopping it from coming to the floor for debate. Time passed and no one knew who the mystery senators were as his aides had clandestinely put a note in every senators mailbox telling them there was a "hold" on the vote.
Not surprisingly, two Senators known for dishing out the pork, Democrat Bob Byrd of West Virginia and Republican Ted Stevens of Alaska were thought to be suspects. Stevens finally confessed because bloggers and on-line activists in both parties heard of the stalling and were furious.
They deluged all 100 senators with e-mails, faxes and calls and it worked. Stevens' staff gave the press some hokum about him being concerned as to adding another layer of bureaucracy. Balderdash. He and too many others don't want us to know what their really doing with these omnibus bills, earmarks and midnight votes.
Known as the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, it will come to a vote in the senate later this month and should easily pass. However if not, maybe it's time to revive the scene from the classic movie "Network." That's where the protagonist calls the public to open their windows and shout in unison, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore."
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