Showing posts with label pork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pork. Show all posts
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Final Plea Against The Largest Spending Bill In History
With Obama about to sign this thing at an invitation-only event tomorrow, I'm days, if not weeks, late to post this, but here it goes: Here are my arguments for why H.R 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the "Stimulus" and gaining recognition as the "Generational Theft Act of 2009" is a really bad idea.
1. $787 billion (that's billion with a B!) is a lot of money.
And all that money has to come from somewhere. The government can either raise it by taxing or taking on debt. Or they can print more money. No one (or few people) are talking about the negative effects of these three possibilities. If we print more money, we get inflation. Borrowing more puts our credit rating at risk and leaves future taxpayers to have to cover the principal and the interest. And raising taxes moves capital from the private sector (the sector we are trying to stimulate!).
2. $787 billion is a lot of money.
OK, so, I repeat myself. But I want you to understand how big that number is. It's $787,000,000,000.00. If you had a pile of that much money in one dollar bills and you stacked it, you'd get about a fifth of the way to the moon. (So, it's literally an astronomical number).
If you had one second for each dollar in that sum, you'd have enough seconds to make up about 24,325 years. Humans started writing things down only 6,000 years ago. 24,325 years is a lot of seconds.
Put yet another way, with Obama's $500,000 executive salary cap now in place, using the $787 billion, you could hire 1,574,000 executives. That's a lot of fat cat executives making a cool half million a year.
Finally, the "Stimulus" costs about $5,700 per taxpayer. How many ways can you think of of how you might prefer to spend $5,700?
3. The government has a really poor track record.
Question: How well did the government do at spending vast sums of money on the Iraq War, Katrina recovery, and Boston's Big Dig?
Let's go ahead, and for the sake of argument, propose that by magic the Congress has really out done themselves here and only a mere 1% of this bill is going to get lost to fraud. But wait, 1% would be nearly 8 billion dollars. Add together the Gross Domestic Product of Nicaragua and Belize. You'll come to about 8 billion. More realistically (based on, say, Katrina figures), we'll see fraud and other waste eat up something like 12% of this bill. So, maybe $100 billion. Yes, billion.
Add on top of this the fact that the government wants to spend much of this as quickly as possible, and we're just setting ourselves up for poor oversight and fraud, waste, more fraud, and more waste.
4. The government doesn't have the information it needs.
Let's guess that between members of Congress, their advisors and the President and his advisors we've had 2,200 people work on this bill. Let's further suppose each of these people had equal weight in putting together the bill such that each person allocated the same amount of money within the bill. That means they each had to allocate more than $350 million. Now consider how you would allocate $350 million dollars - more than a third of a billion - to best help our economy. You probably have no idea. Neither, I'm sure, do they. It's just too much money to know how to precisely use it well. There's too much going on in the economy for an individual to know enough to make meaningful macroeconomic decisions like this. (Note: Arnold King expands on this argument better than I do, here.)
By contrast, when we interact with the economy as private citizens, amazing things happen. We all know our individual niche needs and desires and we can use the information we each individually have to produce some amazingly complex, but still largely efficient, systems. In fact, there are even rewards for being more efficient. But, when a relatively small number (say 2,200 instead of 300 million) are calling the shots they lack this information and these rewards for efficiency.
And to make matters worse, this bill was rushed. The bill was debated for less than an hour in the House to limit input from the Republicans. The pre-conference version of the bill was finalized less than 72 hours before the Senate voted on it. (And, if you could read the bill's legalese at a pace of one page per minute, it would take you more than 16 hours just to read the thing.) And if you divide the bill's cost by the number of seconds spent working on it, you come to one million dollars per second. How do you adequately put in safeguards for prudent spending when the rate is $1,000,000.00 / second?!
5. History says it won't work.
Despite (or because of) the massive spending of the New Deal, the Great Depression lasted ten long years. The Pelosi/Reid/Bush "Stimulus Checks" of last year haven't made a dent in this current recision. Neither have the hundreds of billions used under the TARP program.
Or, looking outside the U.S., Japan spent the 1990s trying to revamp their economy by Keynesian style defecit spending on infrastructure. It didn't work.
And finally, if you look at the historical data - government spending does not create jobs.
6. It's not stimulative.
At least not most of it. Most of it is useless pork. (Here are some more examples.)
Most seem to be putting the "stimulative" portions of the "stimulus" at about 20% of the bill. It makes you wonder why we aren't passing this bill instead.
And for the claims (falsehoods?) about how we, absolutely, positively, must pass this NOW and get money moving NOW, almost half the bill's spending doesn't take place until after 20 months.
Bruce McQuain of QandO puts it well when he terms the bill as "Long On Pork And Relief - Short On Stimulus And Jobs".
1. $787 billion (that's billion with a B!) is a lot of money.
And all that money has to come from somewhere. The government can either raise it by taxing or taking on debt. Or they can print more money. No one (or few people) are talking about the negative effects of these three possibilities. If we print more money, we get inflation. Borrowing more puts our credit rating at risk and leaves future taxpayers to have to cover the principal and the interest. And raising taxes moves capital from the private sector (the sector we are trying to stimulate!).
2. $787 billion is a lot of money.
OK, so, I repeat myself. But I want you to understand how big that number is. It's $787,000,000,000.00. If you had a pile of that much money in one dollar bills and you stacked it, you'd get about a fifth of the way to the moon. (So, it's literally an astronomical number).
If you had one second for each dollar in that sum, you'd have enough seconds to make up about 24,325 years. Humans started writing things down only 6,000 years ago. 24,325 years is a lot of seconds.
Put yet another way, with Obama's $500,000 executive salary cap now in place, using the $787 billion, you could hire 1,574,000 executives. That's a lot of fat cat executives making a cool half million a year.
Finally, the "Stimulus" costs about $5,700 per taxpayer. How many ways can you think of of how you might prefer to spend $5,700?
3. The government has a really poor track record.
Question: How well did the government do at spending vast sums of money on the Iraq War, Katrina recovery, and Boston's Big Dig?
Let's go ahead, and for the sake of argument, propose that by magic the Congress has really out done themselves here and only a mere 1% of this bill is going to get lost to fraud. But wait, 1% would be nearly 8 billion dollars. Add together the Gross Domestic Product of Nicaragua and Belize. You'll come to about 8 billion. More realistically (based on, say, Katrina figures), we'll see fraud and other waste eat up something like 12% of this bill. So, maybe $100 billion. Yes, billion.
Add on top of this the fact that the government wants to spend much of this as quickly as possible, and we're just setting ourselves up for poor oversight and fraud, waste, more fraud, and more waste.
4. The government doesn't have the information it needs.
Let's guess that between members of Congress, their advisors and the President and his advisors we've had 2,200 people work on this bill. Let's further suppose each of these people had equal weight in putting together the bill such that each person allocated the same amount of money within the bill. That means they each had to allocate more than $350 million. Now consider how you would allocate $350 million dollars - more than a third of a billion - to best help our economy. You probably have no idea. Neither, I'm sure, do they. It's just too much money to know how to precisely use it well. There's too much going on in the economy for an individual to know enough to make meaningful macroeconomic decisions like this. (Note: Arnold King expands on this argument better than I do, here.)
By contrast, when we interact with the economy as private citizens, amazing things happen. We all know our individual niche needs and desires and we can use the information we each individually have to produce some amazingly complex, but still largely efficient, systems. In fact, there are even rewards for being more efficient. But, when a relatively small number (say 2,200 instead of 300 million) are calling the shots they lack this information and these rewards for efficiency.
And to make matters worse, this bill was rushed. The bill was debated for less than an hour in the House to limit input from the Republicans. The pre-conference version of the bill was finalized less than 72 hours before the Senate voted on it. (And, if you could read the bill's legalese at a pace of one page per minute, it would take you more than 16 hours just to read the thing.) And if you divide the bill's cost by the number of seconds spent working on it, you come to one million dollars per second. How do you adequately put in safeguards for prudent spending when the rate is $1,000,000.00 / second?!
5. History says it won't work.
Despite (or because of) the massive spending of the New Deal, the Great Depression lasted ten long years. The Pelosi/Reid/Bush "Stimulus Checks" of last year haven't made a dent in this current recision. Neither have the hundreds of billions used under the TARP program.
Or, looking outside the U.S., Japan spent the 1990s trying to revamp their economy by Keynesian style defecit spending on infrastructure. It didn't work.
And finally, if you look at the historical data - government spending does not create jobs.
6. It's not stimulative.
At least not most of it. Most of it is useless pork. (Here are some more examples.)
Most seem to be putting the "stimulative" portions of the "stimulus" at about 20% of the bill. It makes you wonder why we aren't passing this bill instead.
And for the claims (falsehoods?) about how we, absolutely, positively, must pass this NOW and get money moving NOW, almost half the bill's spending doesn't take place until after 20 months.
Bruce McQuain of QandO puts it well when he terms the bill as "Long On Pork And Relief - Short On Stimulus And Jobs".
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Eric Massa
Up until I last year I lived in New York congressional district 29. Two years ago, the contest was between Republican Randy Kuhl (incumbent) and Democrat Eric Massa. This year's election reprises that contest.
In 2006, the Iraq War was "pre-surge," still making daily newspaper headlines, and deeply unpopular. Massa's campaigned tried to seize on the unpopularity of the war and ran on a "I served in the military, and I'm against the war" platform. The race was within a couple points and it took a couple days after the election to figure out exactly who won.
My favorite moment of the entire campaign was getting a voicemail message on my cell from a Massa supporter who wanted me to vote for Massa because Kuhl voted in favor of "CAFTA: The Columbian Free Trade Agreement" which would "ship our jobs to Columbia".
Not being utterly ignorant, I knew the bill was the Central America Free Trade Agreement (or, actually - the Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement). And having a basic grasp of simple economics, such as the principle of comparative advantage, I'm also not ignorant enough to think free trade is a raw deal. For those and a number of other reasons, I voted Kuhl.
Kuhl is nothing to write home about. He resembles everything I hate about the Republican party. In a debate this past week on a local Rochester TV station, Kuhl basically refused to admit that all the pork he's brought back to the district is, in fact, pork. And, as of tonight, doing a Google search on "Kuhl" and "pork" turns up a post on my blog as the top hit (in which I take Kuhl to task for his porking).
And yet, somehow, Massa winds up being even worse than Kuhl in my book.
Let me see if I can explain using this handy diagram of Massa's campaign (click for a larger version):
At some point, Eric Massa got a hold of a picture of Randy Kuhl and President Bush smiling in the back seat of a limo together. Massa uses this image in several of his TV ads and apparently, has a giant wall sized poster of it that he takes around with him.
Apparently, he thinks the good people of NY-29 can be swayed over like a bunch of 4 year olds using the juvenile logic of "see! see! see! Bush is like soooo evil, and Kuhl is like Bush and so Kuhl is evil. Look, look! They were even in a limo together! And they're smiling!!!!!!"
Those of us that aren't 4 years old say "Wow. Two politicians of the same political party were in a car together. And, what's the big deal again?"
Massa also continues to be anti-war and anti-trade. Given our success in Iraq but the trouble in our economy, I find the anti-trade position to be the more concerning of the two. A few weeks ago I responded on YouTube to his anti-trade ad with the following that I'll quote here:
I'll at least give Massa the benefit that he allows comments on his videos.
Perhaps the most concerning thing about Massa though, beyond his juvenile "Bush = Kuhl" rhetoric and stance on free trade, is that in his ads he promotes himself as an "independent voice" but he'd be nothing of the sort.
Massa's campaign is being supported by groups that are left-wing (like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and far-left-wing (like the Daily Kos). These groups aren't giving Massa massive amounts of campaign cash to be "an independent voice."
They want him to be their voice and give left-wing Democrats even further control over the Congress. Or, as Daily Kos founder, Markos Moulitsas, puts it:
Any typically Republican voters considering "going Democrat" this cycle may want to think about if they really want to see a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in Congress under the control of Nancy "you have to rip their face off" Pelosi and Harry "this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything" Reid.
Finally, I'll leave you with a YouTube video I put together of Massa flatly lying about the Bush record on taxes. I did feel a little out of place putting together something that's an awful lot like an attack ad, but I'm so sick of hearing liberal politicians slander the "Bush tax cuts" as tax cuts that were only for the "super rich" that I thought it important to call one of them out on this:
In 2006, the Iraq War was "pre-surge," still making daily newspaper headlines, and deeply unpopular. Massa's campaigned tried to seize on the unpopularity of the war and ran on a "I served in the military, and I'm against the war" platform. The race was within a couple points and it took a couple days after the election to figure out exactly who won.
My favorite moment of the entire campaign was getting a voicemail message on my cell from a Massa supporter who wanted me to vote for Massa because Kuhl voted in favor of "CAFTA: The Columbian Free Trade Agreement" which would "ship our jobs to Columbia".
Not being utterly ignorant, I knew the bill was the Central America Free Trade Agreement (or, actually - the Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement). And having a basic grasp of simple economics, such as the principle of comparative advantage, I'm also not ignorant enough to think free trade is a raw deal. For those and a number of other reasons, I voted Kuhl.
Kuhl is nothing to write home about. He resembles everything I hate about the Republican party. In a debate this past week on a local Rochester TV station, Kuhl basically refused to admit that all the pork he's brought back to the district is, in fact, pork. And, as of tonight, doing a Google search on "Kuhl" and "pork" turns up a post on my blog as the top hit (in which I take Kuhl to task for his porking).
And yet, somehow, Massa winds up being even worse than Kuhl in my book.
Let me see if I can explain using this handy diagram of Massa's campaign (click for a larger version):
At some point, Eric Massa got a hold of a picture of Randy Kuhl and President Bush smiling in the back seat of a limo together. Massa uses this image in several of his TV ads and apparently, has a giant wall sized poster of it that he takes around with him.
Apparently, he thinks the good people of NY-29 can be swayed over like a bunch of 4 year olds using the juvenile logic of "see! see! see! Bush is like soooo evil, and Kuhl is like Bush and so Kuhl is evil. Look, look! They were even in a limo together! And they're smiling!!!!!!"
Those of us that aren't 4 years old say "Wow. Two politicians of the same political party were in a car together. And, what's the big deal again?"
Massa also continues to be anti-war and anti-trade. Given our success in Iraq but the trouble in our economy, I find the anti-trade position to be the more concerning of the two. A few weeks ago I responded on YouTube to his anti-trade ad with the following that I'll quote here:
In 1930, in an attempt to help a troubled economy, the government followed the advice Eric Masssa is advocating in this ad: to move away from free trade towards protectionism.
The result was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, one of the central causes of the Great Depression.
By contrast, the United States saw great economic gains from NAFTA, a policy established under President Clinton!
Our current economic issues come from HUD, Freddie, and Fannie pushing subprime loans, NOT free trade.
I'll at least give Massa the benefit that he allows comments on his videos.
Perhaps the most concerning thing about Massa though, beyond his juvenile "Bush = Kuhl" rhetoric and stance on free trade, is that in his ads he promotes himself as an "independent voice" but he'd be nothing of the sort.
Massa's campaign is being supported by groups that are left-wing (like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and far-left-wing (like the Daily Kos). These groups aren't giving Massa massive amounts of campaign cash to be "an independent voice."
They want him to be their voice and give left-wing Democrats even further control over the Congress. Or, as Daily Kos founder, Markos Moulitsas, puts it:
We have an imperative to take advantage of a historic opportunity to break the conservative movement's backs and crush their spirits. In the White House, that means getting Obama a broad popular and geographic mandate for change. In the House, that means annihilating the Republican caucus and working toward a 100-seat Democratic majority. In the Senate it means getting to a 60-seat filibuster proof majority.
Any typically Republican voters considering "going Democrat" this cycle may want to think about if they really want to see a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in Congress under the control of Nancy "you have to rip their face off" Pelosi and Harry "this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything" Reid.
Finally, I'll leave you with a YouTube video I put together of Massa flatly lying about the Bush record on taxes. I did feel a little out of place putting together something that's an awful lot like an attack ad, but I'm so sick of hearing liberal politicians slander the "Bush tax cuts" as tax cuts that were only for the "super rich" that I thought it important to call one of them out on this:
Saturday, January 26, 2008
House Republicans Get Serious About Pork
H/T Eric @ RedState, House Republicans Know How to Play The Game:
Dear Speaker Pelosi:
The earmark process in Congress has become a symbol of a broken Washington. Wasteful pork-barrel spending has outraged American families and eroded public confidence in our institution. Both of our parties bear responsibility for this failure.
...
In the interim, until a complete earmark moratorium is in place and a bipartisan panel is formed to identify ways to fix Washington’s wasteful pork-barrel spending habits, House Republicans will proceed with the adoption of a series of earmark reform standards we will insist that all House Republican members honor. These earmark reform standards include:
* No more “monuments to me.” ...
* No more “airdrops.” ...
* No more “fronts” or “pass-through” entities. ...
* Members of Congress who request earmarks should put forth a plan detailing exactly how the money will be spent and why they believe the use of taxpayer funding is justified. ...
* ... Members of Congress should require outside earmark recipients to put up “matching funds” ...
* The Executive Branch should be held accountable for its own earmark practices ...
...
We hope that by the end of your own Caucus retreat next week, you and all House Democrats will join us in supporting an immediate moratorium on all earmarks and the immediate formation of a bipartisan panel for the purpose of identifying ways to end wasteful pork-barrel spending in Washington and bring needed change to the way in which Congress spends taxpayers’ hard-earned money.
Nice work John A. Boehner, Roy Blunt, Adam Putnam, Thaddeus McCotter, Kay Granger, John Carter, Tom Cole, and Eric Cantor. Now we just have to wait to see how the Democrats respond.
Another Link Roundup
- Although they coined the phrase, and have never stopped demagoguing about "the politics of personal destruction", somehow I don't think the Clintons will be up in arms about this. I can think of many causes I'd rather see people raising $8.5 million for.
- If you are a Republican who isn't support Romney because of his flip-flopping, you probably shouldn't support McCain either.
- Another reason not to vote for McCain, the NYT Editorial Board endorsement.
- Ed Morrissey explains Why Pork Matters.
- Wal-Mart: So evil, 7,500 people apply for jobs at a single store.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
John P-is-for-pork Murtha
John (or Jack) P. Murtha is in the news again for dubious pork-barrel-related shenanigans:
... Pennsylvania Association for Individuals with Disabilities (PAID) will sponsor a charity golf tournament priced at upwards of $10,000 on September 24, 2007, at the Argyle Country Club in Silver Springs, MD.
The group first came under fire in December, 2006, after the Washington Post reported “PAID has become a gathering point for defense contractors and lobbyists with business before Murtha's defense appropriations subcommittee, and for Pennsylvania businesses and universities that have thrived on federal money obtained by Murtha.”
The main named sponsor of last year’s tournament was Applied Ordnance Technology, which has seen its share of federal funding skyrocket after the company opened an office in Johnstown, PA, at the behest of Murtha.
PAID came under additional scrutiny this week from the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, which reported former U.S. Senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, D-GA - a triple-amputee - quit PAID’s board of directors amid an “investigation of the group’s limited achievements and close ties to a broad network of people and companies Murtha has aided.”
As late as June 25, 2007, PAID’s website named Murtha as its Honorary Chairman. His name has since been removed from the group’s Internet homepage.
PAID’s stated claim of representing “60 million persons with disabilities” was questioned by Roll Call’s Paul Singer, who reported that well-established organizations aiding Pennsylvania’s disabled “had never heard of or worked with PAID.”
A study by the U.S. Census Bureau found that roughly 50 million Americans reported some level of disability; meaning that if PAID’s claims were accurate, they represented more than the entire nationwide population of the disabled.
Of course this really isn't anything new. Murtha's shady dealings go back to the 70s with Abscam and his obnoxious pork-barrel-dealings pretty regularly make the news. For instance, see commentary by Colson in October 2006, or by Barber in November 2006 or by Bluey in May 2007 (just to name a few).
Even earlier this month, prior to the PAID stuff (btw, isn't PAID a great name for a what amounts to a fake charity used to funnel money to influence a congressman? Hiding in plain sight or what?), the Washington Times ran a piece aptly titled "Murtha Shows Appetite for Pork." Some choice selections from that article:
From the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport to the stretch of U.S. 219 named Jack P. Murtha Highway, the Pennsylvania Democrat leaves his mark with federal taxpayer dollars.
...
"Murtha is a poster child for what is wrong with Congress," said Leslie K. Paige, spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, a group targeting mismanagement in Washington. "There are shenanigans going on behind the scenes, and it leads to corruption."
The budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense says Mr. Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense, slipped at least $163.8 million in earmarks into 2008 spending bills.
Murtha, known for brokering backroom earmark deals, insists that it is Congress' job to appropriate funds and that members know what is best for their districts.
"We go over every single earmark," he said on the House floor before the August recess. "We don't apologize for them because we think the members know as much about what goes on in their district as the bureaucrats."
...
[Murtha] also funneled $1.5 million to Concurrent Technologies Corp. (CTC), a Johnstown-based research center, the top executives of which have given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Mr. Murtha, according to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).
...
FEC records show that since 2002, Mr. Murtha's campaigns have gotten $11,500 from CTC President Daniel R. DeVos and his wife, Patricia; $8,500 from CTC executives Edgar Berkley and Jerry Hudson; and $3,750 from CTC General Manager and Treasurer Margaret A. DiVirgilio.
So much for the Democrat's promises to lead the "most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history."
My appeal to Johnstown, PA voters: help lower everyone's taxes and cut back on corruption - kick the bum out.
My appeal to the US Congress: This kind of stuff - dealing in the trade of votes, earmarks, and campaign contributions is the stuff you should be making a big deal about. The Senator Craig and Senator Vitter stuff ... I don't mind that it makes the news - it is news worthy - and Senators that plead guilty to crimes should go - but all that pales in comparison to this stuff. The trade of votes for earmarks and the trade of earmarks to the highest campaign contributor puts the very basis of our democracy in jeopardy.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Kuhl and Pork
Having linked to the congressional web site of my congressman, Randy Kuhl, in my post about the Political Party Differences on Pork, I happened upon Kuhl's news page.
It reads like a pork-fest (yick!):
$4,108,393.00 - and that's just for his news from July 17 - July 25, 2007!
Each and every one of these is a local and/or private concern that should be funded with local and/or private money.
Dear Representative Kuhl: Instead of trying to bring back as much pork as possible to our region, could you please cut out the pork spending from our region and nation wide? You push for tax relief on your campaign website - cutting pork will allow you to do exactly that. Perhaps a read of of Dale Frank's essay on the morality of tax policy is in order?
It reads like a pork-fest (yick!):
- Kuhl Announces Odessa Fire Grant ($20,728)
- Kuhl Announces Knapp Creek Fire Grant ($27,727)
- Kuhl Announces Middlesex Fire Grant ($33,117)
- Kuhl Announces Grant for Canandaigua Airport ($46,550)
- Kuhl Announces Grant for Penn Yan Airport ($338,271)
- Kuhl Secures Monroe County Fairgrounds Funds ($100,000)
- Kuhl Announces Federal Assistance to Watkins ($150,000)
- Kuhl and Walsh Secure Funds for RIT ($1,000,000)
- Kuhl Secures Funds for Hylan Drive ($350,000)
- Kuhl Announces Federal Help to Troupsburg ($192,000)
- Kuhl Secures Funds for St. Bonaventure University ($400,000)
- Kuhl Secures Funds for Monroe Community College ($300,000)
- Kuhl Secures Funds for Alfred University ($900,000)
- Kuhl Secures Funds for Elmira College ($250,000)
$4,108,393.00 - and that's just for his news from July 17 - July 25, 2007!
Each and every one of these is a local and/or private concern that should be funded with local and/or private money.
Dear Representative Kuhl: Instead of trying to bring back as much pork as possible to our region, could you please cut out the pork spending from our region and nation wide? You push for tax relief on your campaign website - cutting pork will allow you to do exactly that. Perhaps a read of of Dale Frank's essay on the morality of tax policy is in order?
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Calling a Disgrace a Disgrace
Well said: Senator Graham on yesterday's House vote for the emergency appropriations bill (my emphasis added):
The vote in the House of Representatives was a disgrace.
The House put more than $20 billion in spending -- completely unrelated to the war -- in the bill. Putting pet projects into an emergency spending bill funding our troops fighting a war is one of the low points of my time in Congress. The Democratic House also put conditions on how to operate in Iraq that will undermine our efforts to secure victory. They set deadlines for withdrawal that will empower our enemies.
In the Senate, I will do everything in my power to strike the provisions of this bill that undercut our troops' ability to win this war. Congress is not the Commander-in-Chief and should not micromanage the war. It's incredibly disappointing to see House Democrats put our troops at risk for short term political gain. The Democratic leadership in the House is like the cavalry in reverse. They're coming over the hill, but instead of helping, you know they are just going to make the problem worse.
The President is right to threaten a veto of this legislation. If this bill ever makes it to his desk, he won't have a shortage of pens available to sign a presidential veto. If necessary, I will be more than happy to bring one for him to use.
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