GOP Bacon

I think me and my friend Lisa are in total agreement on the recent bailout package. Not only do we agree that the bailout is probably not an imminent threat worthy of such drastic measures but we also agree that any bailout should also rescue the taxpayer. Lisa may disagree slightly with that statement, but our overall agreement, too, is that the bailout package was full of way too much pork and not enough protections to the taxpayer.

I think where we will disagree in regards to the pork is why it’s even there in the first place.

Lisa seems to blame the Congress, and rightfully so. The first GOP Bush bill was 3 pages. The House added a hundred or so pages to it consisting mostly of protections to taxpayers and oversight clauses, something the original Republican Bush bill did not include. That bill failed in the House by 12 votes. It did, however, receive large support from the Dems; it was the GOP who refused to turn out the votes. Then the Senate took up the measure and added another couple hundred pages to it. The Democratic-controlled Senate vowed to sweeten the bill in order to get more Republicans to vote for it. Sweeten could easily be called fatten because that is exactly what happened.

Taxpayers for Common Sense has a nice listing of the Top 10 sweeteners fatteners in the bailout. Of the ten listed it’s almost impossible to tell who each specific pork clause is intended for. That’s why Obama’s proposal to create an online database of federal spending tied to the lawmaker who has requested that spending is so important. With that bill this bailout would have to have each lawmaker's name tied to the pork clause, instead of anonymously like it is now. That’s the only way to force lawmakers to own up and the only way to be fiscally responsible.

Without such a mandate to force lawmakers to own up, we can only guess who the bailout pork was intended for. As we already know, the sweetener was added for Republicans not Democrats and from looking at the Top Ten List, it’s easy to tell that five of the ten are GOP related. The others are a guessing game.

Yes, we should be mad about the pork. And yes the Democratic-controlled Congress added the pork but it was added to get Republican support for the bailout. Republicans largely rejected the previous House bill which contained no pork whatsoever. Those so-called fiscally conservative, pork barrel-hating Republicans— yes the same Republicans who turned the largest surplus into the largest deficit in American history and the same Republicans who did not veto a single spending bill for 7 years— sure love bringing home the bacon. John McSame says he’ll veto every pork spending bill that comes to his desk, yet he voted for the bill and still yet Republicans showed up in large droves to support this latest pork spending bill.