Payback's a bitch

[sirs]

Thrown Under the OmniBus

The gold standard in contemptuous politics remains emperor Caligula's appointment of his horse, Incitatus, to the Roman senate. Well, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is getting some long delayed senatorial payback.

Figuratively speaking, Reid plans to drop on the president's desk a steaming pile of what Incitatus used to deposit on the stable floor. This sack of non-shinola goes by the technical name of an omnibus spending bill. It wraps together all of the appropriations bills of the last year into a single $1.2 trillion monstrosity so laden down with spending grotesqueries that it comes out to more than $623 million a page -- and it's 1,924 pages long. By my rough estimate, that's about $3.1 million per word.

It's a bold gambit by Reid and the Democrats, who failed to pass a single appropriations bill all year -- a historic first. Now, a lame-duck Congress that shouldn't be convening at all wants to use a looming deadline vote on raising the national-debt ceiling to cram through legislation that will make the budget and the deficit continue to balloon like Marlon Brando in his later years.

Like Lloyd Bridges in "Airplane!" picking the wrong week to stop sniffing glue, the Democrats have chosen a bad moment to stick to their old ways. We had this thing called an "election" just over a month ago, in which the American people said no more of this horse-stable-filler.

St. Augustine famously said "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet," and that's the basic rationale driving Reid. This is one last trip to the fiscal cathouse before joining the monastery -- which is why this mess comes with $8 billion in earmarked trinkets for the trollops.

But it's important to understand that earmarks aren't the problem. I mean, who among us can second-guess Reid's effort to spend $1 million on arthropod damage in his home state? (I'm giving Reid the benefit of the doubt that these are huge mutant arthropods created by nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, like the giant ants in "Them!")

Earmarks are political bribes, inducing politicians to vote for bad laws they'd otherwise oppose. Few sane people would vote for this crazy parody of everything voters hate about Washington if there weren't something in it for them. That's why the omnibus bill provides $2.5 million for bike paths in Illinois that residents of Illinois don't think are worth paying for with their own dollars, and $307,000 for more research on "small fruits." (Why are they so small? Did they smoke cigarettes in their youth, stunting their growth?)

There's a lot of talk in Washington these days about the need for Barack Obama to "triangulate" -- i.e., move to the center to regain the support of the independents that he's lost and will need again to get re-elected. Conservatives -- me included -- are inclined to think this will be hard for him because Obama is a man of the left and is committed to defending his liberal accomplishments (chiefly ObamaCare), which is hard to do while moving to the center. It's like trying to reconcile with your wife while still keeping your mistress on a stipend.

The bipartisan tax-cut deal is cited by many as proof Obama is, in fact, moderating. Eh, I don't quite buy it, for the simple reason that Obama says at every turn that he hates the two-year compromise and is only doing it because the "hostage-taking" Republicans are making him. That doesn't make him sound more moderate, it makes him sound weak. Worse, it makes him sound like a very liberal president who's just biding his time for more liberal victories ahead.

Well, he's had a second chance with the omnibus bill. And, unlike the tax deal, Obama didn't need to violate his principles or campaign promises. He just needed to adhere to them.

In 2009, Obama -- who campaigned against Washington's earmark culture -- signed another pork-filled bill but said at the time, "this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability that the American people have every right to expect and demand."

More recently, Obama pointed to his failure to live up to his promises of transparency and to change the way Washington works as the key causes of the Shellacking of 2010. The American people wanted better, he's said. But once again given the chance to prove he actually meant it, he opted to hold the voters in contempt and throw them under the omnibus.

Somewhere Incitatus is smiling.

[Kramer]

don't worry all will be ok.

[sirs]

[sirs]

Elections have consequences. The consequences of the November 2010 elections -- and one might add the November 2009 elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the January 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts -- became clear as lights shined over the snow at both ends of the Capitol on Thursday night.

At the north end of the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid abruptly withdrew the 1,924-page omnibus spending bill he had submitted two days before. Reid had hoped that the $8 billion worth of earmarks, including some for Republicans, would provide the Republican votes to pass a bill that financed Obamacare and otherwise furthered Democratic policy goals well into the next calendar year.

But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was able to persuade Republican appropriators not to swallow the bait. Democrats might have gotten their pet provisions through if they had submitted and passed appropriations bills earlier in the year.

But having failed to follow regular legislative order, they were caught defying the will of the voters so clearly expressed in November. Reid's ploy collapsed.

At the south end of the Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to watch gloomily as her Democrats failed to rally majorities to alter -- and probably sidetrack -- the deal reached between Barack Obama and Republican congressional leaders extending the Bush tax cuts for two years.

Instead, the House voted 277-148 for a measure that the Senate had passed 81-19 earlier in the week. "If someone had told me, the day after Election Day 2008, that the tax rates on income and capital would not increase for the next four years," wrote Bush White House staffer Keith Hennessey in his blog, "I would have laughed."

Plenty of time for laughter now, for Hennessey and for the couple of million people who in some way, shape or form took part in the protests symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement.

It is a source of continuing fascination for me to watch the interaction between public opinion, as measured in polls and election results, and the actions of members of Congress, elected in one political environment and looking in most cases to be re-elected in one that may be quite different.

Eleven months ago, after the Massachusetts Senate election, I was convinced that Democrats could not jam their health care bill through because voters had so clearly demanded they not do so. But Pelosi proved more determined and resourceful than I had imagined, and found enough House Democrats who were willing to risk electoral defeat to achieve what Democrats proclaimed was a historic accomplishment.

Pelosi and Barack Obama predicted that Obamacare would become more popular as voters learned more about it. Those predictions were based on the theory that in times of economic distress, Americans would be more supportive of or amenable to big government policies.

That theory has been disproved about as conclusively as any theory can be in the real world, and most of the Democrats who provided the key votes for Obamacare were defeated on Election Day.

Democratic congressional leaders did take note of the unpopularity of their policies when they chose not to pass budget resolutions last spring. Presumably they did so because they would have had a hard time rounding up the votes for the high spending and large deficits that would have ensued.

But had the House and Senate passed a budget resolution, Democrats might have been able to pass their preferred tax policy, raising taxes on high earners, under the budget reconciliation process. So the House vote Thursday night was a delayed consequence of the public's long-apparent rejection of their policies.

Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to "spread the wealth around." November's vote, presaged by more than a year of polls, was, as political scientist James Ceasar has written, "the Great Repudiation" of that policy.

Republicans, having succeeded in holding down tax rates, clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending, and to defund and derail Obamacare, which is at or near new lows in the ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen polls. And there does seem an opening, as Clinton White House staffer William Galston argues, for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates.

How effectively the 112th Congress will respond is unclear. But the outgoing 111th Congress, despite its big Democratic majorities, responded pretty clearly Thursday night.


Mugged by public opinion