W ho says bipartisanship is dead? Democrats and Republicans joined hands last week and demonstrated yet again that they are always happy to pig out at taxpayers’ expense.
As Sen. John McCain said, things have gotten so bad in Congress that the porkaholics won’t even vote for a mere one-year pause. He was referring to the 71-29 vote against the DeMint-McCaskill budget amendment requiring a one-year moratorium on earmarks, which have been described by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., as the “gateway drug to federal spending addiction.” Also voting for the moratorium were Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. All three presidential contenders took time off from the campaign trail to return to the nation’s capital to vote for DeMint-McCaskill. Evidently, spending time away from Washington helps keep politicos connected to reality.
Interestingly, the average seniority of senators voting for DeMint-McCaskill was 12 years, while the opponents averaged 22 years. It’s not a perfect correlation, but clearly the longer people are in Congress, the more likely they are to vote to preserve their ability to dole out tax dollars to favored recipients via earmarks. From a partisan perspective, the Democrats oinked the loudest: 45 of 51 in the Senate voted against DeMint-McCaskill, while 26 of 49 Republicans cast nay votes. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should heed the votes of Obama and Clinton if they want to put their fingers on the public pulse.
Then there were the Senate and House votes last week on the 2009 federal budget. Here the Democratic majorities in both chambers showed their disdain for taxpayers by refusing to extend President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, thus insuring massive tax increases for most taxpayers beginning in two years. That’s not a partisan Republican characterization, it’s from the AP, which reported that “both houses of Congress endorsed the idea of tax increases for millions of Americans Thursday as Democrats pressed ahead with budget plans that would allow some or all of President Bush’s reductions to die after he leaves office.” Those tax increases will be more than $3,100 per household, according to Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, if all of the Bush cuts are allowed to expire.
The hypocrisy award here goes to the 20 Senate Republicans who voted against the earmark moratorium, then a few hours later voted against the budget blueprint that would kill the Bush tax cuts. (Ted Stevens of Alaska voted present on the latter). These are the Senate Republicans who talk the talk but go weak in the knees at the thought of losing their precious earmarks.
Their five GOP colleagues who both voted against DeMint-McCaskill and for the Democrats’ budget at least can say they are consistent about feeding their drug problem.
