Before the tryptophan and sugar buzz wears off completely is a good time to look back on what the 110th Congress did for us in 2007.
Our representatives passed 155 bills that the president signed into public laws; 64 of those statutes authorize … the renaming of public facilities. Exercising its version of due diligence, Congress not only gave us the Gerald R. Ford post office in Vail, Colo., but the Scipio A. Jones post office, the Lane Evans post office, the Lino Perez Jr. post office, the Miguel Angel Garcia Mendez post office, the Leonard W. Herman post office, the Frank G. Lumpkin Jr. post office, the Santiago E. Campos courthouse, the Clifford Davis and Odell Horton federal building, the Robert T. Stafford White Rocks National Recreation Area, and the Oscar G. Johnson Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center, among dozens of others.
Unfortunately, political bone-throwing didn’t take up enough time to keep lawmakers out of real mischief. They also wrote laws dictating greater waste of the taxpayers’ money.
In many cases, Congress didn’t even bother coming up with new material; it merely extended spending on anachronistic programs such as the Older Americans Act of 1965, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and the Small Business Act of 1958. When a program has been in effect more than 40 years, wouldn’t it be reasonable to determine whether it has served its purpose before throwing more money at it?
Not that it would matter. The Head Start program has had more than 40 years to close the gap in academic achievement between poor children and non-poor children and has consistently failed to do so. Yet instead of conceding that the program is a failure, Congress gives it more money every year because refusing to waste money on children is politically untenable.
In fact, the children don’t even have to be poor. One of the bills Congress passed this year expanded the District of Columbia College Access Act to include students from families with a taxable annual income of less than $1 million.
Since, by that standard, many members of Congress qualify as poor, they obviously felt justified passing the law that transfers funds from the Senate gift shop to the Senate day care center. (Children, can you say “shameless”?)
Not all of the expenditures are wasteful, but not all are federal responsibilities. For instance, Congress allocated money for “the construction, operation, and maintenance of an arterial road in St. Louis County, Missouri.” Why should taxpayers in Rhode Island send money to Washington to pay for that?
When they weren’t busy authorizing extravagant spending or honoring Clem Rogers McSpadden with a post office, representatives addressed other matters they evidently considered pressing.
Congress repealed certain sections of the 1936 law pertaining to the Virgin Islands, extended the Andean Trade Preference Act, established a United States–Poland parliamentary youth exchange program, recognized the Navy SEAL museum in Fort Pierce, Fla., as the national Navy SEAL museum, reauthorized the Asian Elephant Conservation Act of 1997, allowed an exception to the law requiring all government vending machines to dispense $1 coins for machines that don’t accept currency of greater value than $1, and passed a law allowing the executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank or the alternate executive director to serve on the board of directors of the Inter-American foundation. (We all sleep more soundly knowing that one has been settled.)
Oh, yes: Congress also passed a law increasing the statutory limit on the public debt from $8.9 trillion to $9.8 trillion.
Yet, while elected representatives dithered over travesties and trivialities, federal agencies added 73,826 pages of rules to the Federal Register. These are the regulations that govern the most minute aspects of everyday life — medical care, food sales, agriculture, travel, construction, commerce, etc. — yet Congress plays almost no part in them.
Elected representatives give rule-making authority to unelected bureaucrats, who are free to make up all the mindless regulations they want. Unless a member of Congress is snared by one — as when Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., found himself on the Transportation Security Administration’s “no-fly list” — Congress rarely intervenes.
But it should. Perhaps one of our nation’s collective resolutions for 2008 should be to demand that lawmakers stop abdicating their responsibility to make significant laws. At the very least, they should provide meaningful oversight of those who make the significant rules.
Examiner Columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
