Now, after the election two weeks ago, I was left in a bit of a daze. I was mourning the loss of Russ Feingold, and lamenting how Tom Barrett, despite his overwhelming lack of redeeming qualities, was defeated by Scott Walker, a man of perhaps even fewer of the aforementioned qualities. But like a perpetually disappointed and cynical phoenix, my faith in the system is being restored…by Senator-Elect Ron Johnson.
As uncomfortable of a sentence as that was to type for me, it’s for more than mere shock value to fellow individuals of the lefty persuasion. Johnson has recently signed on with a number of other GOP Senators, six of them senators-elect, with Tea Party darling Jim DeMint, R-S.C., to bar Senate Republicans from seeking earmarks for two years.
This proposed legislation also pits a number of idealistic freshman senators against the more traditional GOP establishment headed by Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader. Hard times are ahead for the Right, but, at least from my perspective, for all the right reasons.
Now, while it’s unfortunate that Feingold, a stalwart opponent of pork barrel spending, had to be ousted to see something like this happen, it’s still progress, people.
Earmarks allow elected officials to, in a sense at least, bring home the bacon by securing funding for their home states by slipping innocent little million dollar requests into legislation. If you’re familiar with the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, then you know just how essential these earmarks are to the livelihood of our democracy and the vacuity that fuels it.
Citizens Against Government Waste, the group behind the quaint little ad depicting our future Chinese overlords having a good laugh over our ever-increasing debt to them, put the total pork barrel spending in fiscal year 2010 at $16.5 billion. And though it’s a marked decline from the $19.6 billion in tax dollars spent in 2009, it still paints a sorry picture for our government’s accountability and integrity.
While the Tea Party’s “throw out the bums” mantra may seem to be steeped in appealing to the least-informed denominator and riding the people power wave that put many of its own into office, the threat of corruption and glad-handing facilitated by earmarks cannot be overlooked.
By opposing earmarks, Johnson is making good on a substantial piece of his platform of reducing wasteful government spending. This is admirable given that the other biggest campaign promise Wisconsin saw this past election season is shaping up to be a hefty charitable donation to the transportation department funds of either Illinois or New York, though I’m sure the contributions to Scott Walker’s campaign by the Transportation Builders Association are now looking like a pretty good investment. We’re stupid, you’re welcome.
The only part of this earmark business that really bothers me is that it only bans GOP Senators from requesting earmarks for only two years. An outright ban in Congress may not have the backing at this point in time, but I’m confident the Tea Partiers can throw together a few hundred candidacies (the Denny’s down the block closed and people need jobs, P.S. Obama? Total Muslim) in the coming years to make this a reality. Elected officials should be sure they actually need to be reelected before taking their corporate relationships to the next level.
What it really comes down to, at least in my brainwashed liberal mind, is this: before you start climbing into bed with every professional organization and corporate interest that comes around, you should at least be sure they’ll stick around for breakfast in the morning.
So Ron, as much as it pains me to say it, thank you for what you’re doing and I look forward to seeing what else you can do. Yeah, that just still doesn’t sound right to me.
Jake Begun ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.
