FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 11, 1999
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
The federal beast will not be caged so easily
The "Contract With America" on which Republicans swept to control of the House of Representatives in 1994 promised voters that -- if only they would change their habits and vote Republican -- $75.3 billion worth of federal programs would be promptly zeroed out, cancelled, deep-sixed, rendered extinct.
Gone by now, voters were promised, would be the $31.2 billion federal Department of Education, the $3.4 billion Department of Commerce, $867 million in annual federal expenditures for summer youth employment training, $231 million for the "Goals 2000" socialist education agenda, $82 million in "school-to-work" grants ... even $332 million in aid to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.
Needless to say, Republicans soon found the culture of spending on Capitol Hill to be a bit more impervious to assault than they figured. When any attempt to "trim the growth" (already a goal far short of actually reducing spending, mind you) of the Department of Education was hectored by ululating liberals as "opposition to child literacy itself," Republicans covered their heads and ran for cover. When they refused to spend enough in 1995, President Clinton closed down the government (which really only meant blocking access to a few national monuments -- if any private employers were advised to stop remitting their withholding taxes it somehow escaped notice), and blamed the (start ital)GOP(end ital) for shutting down the government. And verily, the entire national press corps pointed its collective finger at the red-faced Republicans and cried: "For shame."
The end result?
While spending on the federal Department of Education was $31.2 billion when the GOP took control of the House in 1995, the Washington Post reports that figure is now ... $34.3 billion. While spending on the discredited and payola-ridden Department of Commerce in 1995 was $3.4 billion, that figure is now ... $4.7 billion, up 40 percent. While the 1995 federal allocation for summer youth employment training was $867 million, that figure is now ... $871 million. While the 1995 federal allocation for "Goals 2000" was $231 million, that allocation under the "tight-fisted, hard-hearted" Republicans is now ... $507 million, up 119 percent. Those $82 million in "school-to-work" grants the chainsaw Republicans were going after? Um, try $503 million in 1999, up a whopping 513 percent.
Even $332 million in aid to East Europe and the Baltic states -- what? -- finds itself a booming $450 million program in 1995.
Why, even those programs at whose elimination the GOP initially appeared to have succeeded now threaten to return from the grave. The notorious wool and mohair subsidy has had a "Lazarus-like experience after it was killed in 1996," reports Michael Grunwald of the Post. "Last year, Sen. Larry E. Craig, R-Idaho, yet another staunch conservative, stashed no-interest loans to mohair farmers into a budget bill, as well as a new National Sheep Industry Improvement Center."
And while the 1995 Republican revolution did initially eliminate the Stateside Land and Water Conservation Fund, which over three decades had provided more than $3 billion for nearly 40,000 park and recreation projects, "arguing the country's cash-flush states and communities ought to pay for their own swimming pools," who's funding those projects today?
"The fund may be coming back from the dead," the Post reported last week. "On July 13, the House narrowly approved an amendment restoring $30 million for it, with 55 Republicans joining 157 Democrats in support."
GOP leaders don't even seem to go through the motions of trying to stay on the wagon of spending abstinence, any more. So far this summer they "larded up one spending bill with 215 pork-barrel projects, funding everything from windstorm research to ship-bottom painting, and postponed another because they could not figure out how to keep it within their caps," the Post reports.
So, as a result of this abject failure to trim the size of gargantuan, out-of-control government in a city where the 10th amendment is now widely laughed off as "a truism," are Republicans now welcomed with open arms by the big-spending, liberal establishment?
In the final and most ironic application of liberal principles, no, they are still judged by their free-market, laissez-faire, limited-government (start ital)rhetoric(end ital), rather than by the actual bustling bureaucratic anthills they have wrought. Starving the widows and orphans, tax cuts for the rich: the collectivist rhetoric of lachrymose "compassion" has not changed.
"For those of us who came here with a zeal for limiting government, it's been a very frustrating four-and-a-half years," sighs Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., one of the most outspoken conservatives of the GOP freshman class of 1994.
Why?
Mainly, Congress has lost the anchor which used to be provided when it was necessary to ask where in the Constitution a program was specifically authorized. Remember when the interstate highway system had to be called the "defense highway system," since Article I Section 8 authorized expenditures "to provide for the common defense," but not to build highways merely to facilitate truck competition with the railroads?
The interstates were thus designed and funded specifically to facilitate troop movements in case America should be invaded on two coasts at once -- right down to curves engineered for the estimated top speed of two-and-a half-ton army trucks. If you doubt this, you can go check the original spending authorizations.
What's that? Defense highway routings would naturally want to avoid population centers, bound to become bottlenecks in times of war, whereas our interstate "defense" highways actually lead directly from city to city?
Whoops.
But even as recently as the 1950s, Congress at least still felt it necessary to pay lip service to the idea that the purposes for which the federal government may raise and spend money are limited to and by a specific list of 431 words, beginning, "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense ..."
Now, that discipline is completely gone. No one even asks, anymore, whether a specific allocation is authorized by the clause that allows Congress to establish post offices, or the clause that allows it to provide and maintain a navy, or the clause that allows it to arm and discipline the militia ...
Today, anything goes.
At which point, the constituency that favors aid to Lithuania will show up in force when it comes time to discuss funding aid to Lithuania ... while who will speak for the long-suffering taxpayer, busy at work and not even dreaming that's where some portion of today's paycheck is bound?
"The age-old dilemma for budget-cutters is that special interests always go to the mat for the programs that affect them; there are few votes or campaign contributions to be won by attacking any particular program," explains analyst Grunwald of the Post. "(Rep. Mark) Sanford says that every day, constituents and lobbyists tell him how much they appreciate his efforts to slash federal spending. Then they get to the main reason for their visit: more funding for their pet project."
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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