OK, let’s stipulate for purposes of discussion that President Obama really means it when he says the present course of federal spending “cannot be sustained” and that he wants to get rid of that $1.3 trillion annual federal deficit.
Even if Obama follows up his proposed three-year partial federal spending freeze — defense, homeland security and entitlements are exempted — with additional concrete steps to cut out the waste and duplication in the bureaucracy, does anybody truly believe this Congress will go along?
Oh, it will talk about it — endlessly. But don’t expect most of these clowns actually to vote to cut spending. They can talk about spending discipline all day, but it’s another Washington Wink-Wink fraud.
Consider four Senate votes Tuesday on amendments offered by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. One Coburn amendment passed unanimously. Here’s the text of the Coburn amendment the Senate approved on a 94-0 vote:
“The Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shall conduct routine investigations to identify programs, agencies, offices and initiatives with duplicative goals and activities within departments and government-wide, and report annually to Congress on the findings, including the cost of such duplication and with recommendations for consolidation and elimination to reduce duplication, identifying specific reasons.”
Writing in The Examiner last week, Coburn pointed out that at least $120 billion could be saved just by eliminating the duplication among more than 640 federal programs that in one way or another duplicate each other.
All of Coburn’s colleagues voted yes, with most no doubt privately thinking they will simply ignore whatever bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo GAO comes up with in its future reports.
But things turned out quite differently when the votes were counted on Coburn’s other three amendments. Senators could have put their votes where their mouths are on spending. But they didn’t:
á They voted 57-37 against Coburn’s amendment canceling up to $100 billion in tax dollars federal agencies have had lying around unspent for at least two years.
á They voted 61-33 against Coburn’s amendment listing specific duplicative programs in every major federal department, the elimination of which would save $22 billion.
á They voted 48-46 against Coburn’s amendment to reduce the Senate’s spending on itself by $245 million, which is mere chump change in Washington these days.
How do we explain these Senate votes? It’s easy, actually. They vote unanimously to slough off on GAO the most basic job given to Congress by the Founders — deciding how much the government will spend and on what.
Then, they go back home and boast to the rubes beyond the Beltway about how fearlessly they authorized “the investigative arm of Congress” to root out waste and inefficiency, and to recommend needed reforms.
Too many of our senators and representatives think the rest of us are too stupid to figure out that such votes are utterly meaningless exercises in Macbethian futility — full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing (but their contempt for their constituents).
What they don’t realize is that we have also seen the other three votes and the hundreds like them taken by Congress year in and year out. We also see those spending bills stuffed full of political payoffs — aka earmarks — for their friends, campaign donors, former staffers and even family members.
But this game may be about to end. Voters in 2006 tossed out a feckless Republican majority that had spent the previous decade with President Bush in a spending splurge unmatched since LBJ and the Great Society.
Now with the Democrats in control for a couple of years, my esteemed Examiner colleague Michael Barone tells us that in the wake of Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Miracle, he has “not seen a party’s fortunes collapse so suddenly since Richard Nixon got caught up in the Watergate scandal and a president who carried 49 states was threatened with impeachment and removal from office.”
Both parties be warned: The 2010 election is still months away, and things can change between now and then. But as long as Congress keeps doing its Jekyll and Hyde routine, odds are good that we rubes aren’t going to forget.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
