----
March 28, 2007
"Emergency" Funding
Kos brings up a very important point in the current fight over war funding :
The reason there is a fight over Iraq funding is because Bush decided not to include such funding in the regular budget.It's ludicrous to keep pretending that these appropriations are "emergencies" as Bush and his allies like to suggest. These are wholly predictable requests that the Administration refused to ask for in their annual budget. If they want extra money for their war, they should be willing to defend it through actual budget cuts elsewhere, rolling back the tax cuts for the rich, or additional oversight. The fact that the President is willing to risk not providing funding for our troops while he plays petty political games says all you need to know about his priorities.Why not?
Who knows? Perhaps because his election-year budget presented fictional progress toward a "balanced budget". If he included his war funding in that budget, he couldn't pretend a balanced budget was within reach. (A trillion dollar war makes that difficult.)
But let's not forget, the only reason this fight is being waged, is because Bush chose to underfund our troops in his regular budget.
While I'm on the subject, I can't help but agree with the Republican leadership that the amount of pork in the House and Senate versions of the funding bill is pretty pathetic :
In addition to money and equipment for overseas troops, there is $100 million for state and local law enforcement agencies in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul to provide security for next year's presidential nominating conventions.The very next sentence, however, pretty much deflates any moral high ground the GOP may be wanting to exhibit (as if the last six years weren't enough).Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., won renewal of an income subsidy program for small-operation dairy farmers that promises to cost taxpayers $1.2 billion over the next five years.
And while the Senate bill has no money earmarked for spinach and peanut farmers - as there is in a House companion bill - sugar beet growers in the Red River Valley stand to get $24 million to cover crop losses from flooding two years ago.
But there's a problem facing conservatives striving to knock out what the White House calls "excessive and extraneous" spending: Many Republicans support the extras.It's a sad fact that getting this bill through the Senate and House required some unrelated concessions a few fence-sitting Republicans (and Democrats). What's worse? The fact that Democrats are willing to throw pork into an appropriations bill or that the votes of moderates are so easy to buy? Since this whole appropriations bill (with the withdrawal language) is veto-bait anyways, here's hoping all that pork doesn't make it into the final bill. posted by greg at March 28, 2007 04:57 PM
----
----
