A Senate staffer — who shall remain nameless here — must have awakened on the wrong side of the bed Monday morning. Said staffer exploded in response to a constituent’s question whether the staffer’s boss was the senator who placed an anonymous hold on S. 2590, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.
The constituent was acting in response to a suggestion from Porkbusters.org, which for several days has been encouraging readers to contact their senators and ask if they are behind the anonymous hold that has stopped FFATA, which would make most federal spending public via an Internet database. Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., are the ideologically unlikely main backers of FFATA, which is also supported by this newspaper and more than 100 citizen groups that span the political spectrum.
The Porkbusters effort to identify the anonymous holding senator is unfair, claimed the offended staffer, because it represents a “guilty until proven innocent approach.” That curmudgeonly observation elicited this rather charitable response from Instapundit.com’s Glenn Reynolds: “It’s the Senate’s effort to avoid transparency and accountability that’s at the root of the problem here. Senators conducting Senate business aren’t like individuals going about their private lives. They are public officials, who work for the public, who are doing the public’s business, not their own. The Senate’s tendency to forget that, and to wallow in its own sense of entitlement, is what’s wrong here. Complaints like this one just underscore that.”
FFATA has more than a dozen Senate co-sponsors and was unanimously reported to the full Senate by the Homeland Security Committee chaired by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. Notable among the co-sponsors are Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Tom Carper, D-Del., and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. That leaves about 80 to 85 senators as logical suspects. See if your state’s senators are among the suspects by checking in at porkbusters.org/secrethold.php. Not sure who are your state’s two senators? Visit senate.gov and look in the upper right-hand corner of the page.
Odds are slim that the real senator or senators behind the anonymous hold will ever come forward voluntarily, even though for years it has been customary in these arcane matters beyond the Senate cloakroom for the identity of such holders to be kept private only so long as necessary to force some sort of compromise on the legislation in question. Compromise is probably not the spirit behind the present anonymous hold.
The problem here, of course, is that federal spending transparency is anathema for too many Democrats and Republicans in government. They think members of the public ought to keep their noses out of how their tax dollars are being spent by the Potomac potentates at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and all the departments and agencies in between. The attitude was epitomized by former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s statement that he was “damn tired” of the “so-called porkbusters” because “they’ve been nothing but trouble ever since Katrina.” Those words sound like something you’d expect from a prime suspect in the present mystery, do they not?
