Takeover (20 page)

Bush’s compassionate conservatism graced every speech, woven through promises to improve education, keep the peace, and cut taxes.
⁴

Bush opened many rallies and appearances with a local dignitary reading a letter from the most loved politician in the state, Senator Strom Thurmond, who endorsed Bush, saying, “After eight years of Clinton–Gore, the stakes are too high to stay at home. My friends in South Carolina have been with me through many campaigns and we’ve done right by South Carolina. I ask everyone here tonight to join in one more crusade and support George W. Bush as he leads our country forward in the 21st century.”
⁵

While some conservatives remained skeptical, after being clobbered in New Hampshire, despite outspending McCain by a substantial amount of money there, Bush convinced enough conservatives to vanquish McCain in the crucial South Carolina primary, largely on the strength of his conservative support.

George W. Bush gathered that conservative support by presenting himself as a man of principles, more than on the strength of any of his policy prescriptions, which were mostly mainstream Republican proposals that had been around Capitol Hill for years.

Governor Bush said in his victory speech the night he won the South Carolina primary, “I’m often asked about my tax cut plan. They say it’s not popular in the polls. ‘Why won’t you back down, Governor?’ And I say, you’ve got the wrong man. I make my decisions on what’s best for America. I make my decisions based upon principle, not based upon polls and focus groups.” It was that commitment to principles, presumably conservative principles, not the tax plan, that won Bush the South Carolina primary and ultimately the White House.
⁶

McCain went on to win other primaries, including Michigan, just days after his defeat in South Carolina, but conservatives had made up their minds to support Texas governor George W. Bush, and the 2000 Republican presidential nomination was never really
in doubt after South Carolina.

In hindsight, it was clear George W. Bush had no intention of pursuing a conservative agenda as president. However, he was well advised enough to understand that, if his chief opponent was John McCain, he could only get to the White House with conservative support, and as a South Carolina voter interviewed by the
Independent
’s Andrew Marshall said with a hint of guilt for being inclined to support the Texas governor early in the South Carolina primary, “He’s a politician, sneaky, in a subtle sort of way.”
⁷

A
s the 2000 presidential campaign unfolded, some conservatives were disturbed by George W. Bush’s use of the term “compassionate conservatism,” which seemed to imply that “regular” conservatism was not compassionate.

We remembered how our movement’s first political leader, Barry Goldwater, scorned the progressive establishment Republicans’ use in his day of the term “progressive conservatism.” “This is a strange label indeed,” he wrote in
The Conscience of a Conservative
. “It implies that ‘ordinary’ conservatism is opposed to progress. Have we forgotten that America made its greatest progress when conservative principles were honored and preserved?”

“Compassionate conservatism,” also had a strong scent of the “kinder, gentler” conservatism that Bush’s father had described in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention and that we soon learned was not conservatism at all, but a return to the progressive Republicanism of Teddy Roosevelt, Tom Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Richard Nixon.

Despite the misgivings of some conservatives, when George W. Bush was inaugurated as our forty-third president, with a Republican majority in the House and Senate to back him up, the average
grassroots conservative voter thought that Bill Clinton’s statement that “the era of Big Government is over” was about to become reality. Boy, were they ever mistaken.

Clinton, of course, knew full well that Big Government was growing and would continue to grow. What he probably didn’t anticipate was that, as fast as government grew under his administration and a Democratic Congress in 1993–94, it would grow much faster under a Republican president with a Republican Congress.

Once George W. Bush was sworn in as president and Republicans had control of both elected branches of the federal government, the era of Big Government really was over, and the era of Obese Government had begun!

When Bill Clinton made his (possibly tongue-in-cheek) claim about the era of Big Government being over, the federal government was spending $1,635.9 billion. Just seven years later, in 2003, the federal government was spending $2.3 trillion, and by the end of President George W. Bush’s second term in 2008, the federal government was spending $3.2 trillion, almost double what it was spending when the era of Big Government supposedly ended. For that we can thank both Republicans and Democrats, but most Democrats don’t claim to be, or campaign as, fiscal conservatives, as George W. Bush did.
¹

With the solid backing of conservatives, Republican George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000 and the succeeding election as well. We gave a Republican president, who ran as a conservative, a Republican House in 2000, 2002, and 2004, and a Republican Senate in 2000 (until the defection of Vermont senator Jim Jeffords), 2002, and 2004. We conservatives had every right to expect that
finally
we’d see government spending brought under control, and the size of the federal government cut back.

Instead, the size of the federal government increased at a faster rate under the Bush administration and a Republican Congress than at any time since President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Great Society. The Bush years were responsible for a near doubling of the
federal budget and set the stage for the unprecedented spending of President Barack Obama and the Pelosi–Reid Congress that followed.

How could this happen? It happened because there was what was for all intents and purposes a corrupt bargain struck between President Bush and the leaders of the Capitol Hill Republican establishment, particularly establishment Republicans Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and majority whip Tom DeLay.

Hastert and DeLay sought to shore up their Republican majority in the House and at the same time impose an ironclad discipline upon it through “earmarks” and pork-barrel spending of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

Far from being fiscal conservatives, these two cynical politicians saw the federal budget as their personal political slush fund to be used to advance their personal power and to permanently entrench themselves, and their cronies, in positions of power.

Here’s how it worked.

Typically, an individual member of Congress, with the approval of the majority leadership, inserted an “earmark” into a spending bill. The president didn’t request such spending, and it evaded the usual procedures for competitive bidding, expert review, and cost-benefit analysis.

“Each one of these,” said the
Washington Post
, “as Mr. Reagan understood, but Mr. Bush apparently doesn’t, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers’ dollars.”

There really is no better illustration of the corrupting influence of power on the principle-free Republican establishment than the explosion of “earmarks” and pork-barrel spending projects during the presidency of George W. Bush.

When Reagan said, “I haven’t seen so much lard since I handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair,” in March 1987, he then vetoed the Transportation bill because it contained 152 congressional earmarks. When his veto was overridden with the help of thirteen Republican senators, he had his OMB director, Jim Miller, look into the Constitution to see if there was any way to stop earmarks
from being implemented in the Omnibus Appropriation Bill Congress later passed.
²
According to Phil Kerpen’s “Earmarks and the Executive” in
National Review
,

Miller checked with attorneys and legal scholars and discovered that committee report language, which is where earmarks appear, should not be treated as law since it fails to meet the requirements of the Presentment Clause of the Constitution.

Acting in accord with the Constitution, Miller told executive agencies to comply with the law and spend money on accounts for which it was appropriated. Meanwhile, he instructed agencies to treat report language properly—in other words, as not binding—and to disregard earmarks in committee reports. Spending decisions would thus be merit-based and not subject to political manipulation. Appropriators and other Members of Congress predictably were outraged, and they used every lever of power available to retaliate. (They even threatened to de-fund Miller’s Office of Management and Budget.) Reagan, who had his hands full with Iran-Contra, ultimately backed down.
³

Since then there has been a conspiracy of silence; members of Congress have struck an agreement: “I won’t object to your earmark if you don’t object to mine.” And the leaders of key committees get the lion’s share of earmarks. You don’t complain about that, either, if you ever hope to get legislation through their committees.

Although the establishment news media loved to portray them as skinflints, when it came to spending, the Republicans who controlled Congress during the Clinton years weren’t exactly bashful about popping in some pork spending for their districts. But when the Republicans took over the White House and the Congress, the flood of earmarks became downright obscene.

Despite the fact that these “earmarks” were not part of his budget request and distorted the policies of his administration, especially in the areas of defense and transportation spending, President George W. Bush never vetoed a budget.

President Bush kept his part of the bargain with Hastert and
DeLay. In return for no trouble on his military adventures overseas, he let the Republicans on Capitol Hill have their way on spending.

Omnibus spending bills are a favorite place in which to hide these earmarks. The bills are so huge (often thousands of pages in length) and members have so little time in which to consider them (usually a couple of days or less), that no one is likely to discover a piece of pork, no matter how ludicrous, until a congressman brags about it to the folks back home, and then it’s too late.

But transportation bills, like the one Reagan vetoed because it had 152 earmarks, are even worse. The transportation bill enacted in 2005, for example, was the most expensive public works legislation in our nation’s history, and printed out at 1,752 pages. It was also laden with no fewer than 6,373 pork-barrel earmarks. Unlike President Reagan, when a pork-laden transportation bill passed in 2005, President George W. Bush didn’t blink at signing into law a pigsty piece of legislation containing 6,373 earmarks.

Back in the bad old days, when Republicans derided Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals, the late senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) was castigated as the king of pork. His state typically received two dollars in federal largesse for each one dollar it produced in tax revenue.

During the Bush years, the king of pork indisputably was Don Young, the Republican congressman from Alaska and chairman of the House Transportation Committee. His state got five dollars back for each one dollar paid in taxes, thanks to taxpayers in the other forty-nine states.

Young, it seems, has no shame. He bragged that the 2005 transportation bill was stuffed “like a turkey” with pork dressing, including a $231 million bridge in Anchorage to be named “Don Young’s Way.” But the real poster boy in Don Young’s pork bill is the now infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.”

Congress authorized $223 million to build a mile-long bridge connecting Gravina Island, Alaska (population fifty), with Ketchikan, Alaska (population 8,044, with a median household
income 9 percent higher than the national median). It was designed to rise two hundred feet above the water, almost twice as high as the 119-foot-high Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s not as if the fifty residents of Gravina Island are cut off from civilization. A ferry transports them to Ketchikan in five minutes. And yes, there’s a small airport on the island, but anyone in Ketchikan who wants to catch a plane can also use that five-minute ferry ride. Because of the mountainous topography, and thus the circuitous route of the highway connecting with the bridge, it would actually take longer to get to the airport via the highway and bridge.

Parade
magazine sent a reporter to Ketchikan and Gravina Island to see if there was some urgent need for the bridge that hadn’t come to anyone’s attention. What he found was this sort of attitude, coming from a local politician: “The general feeling here is that if someone else is paying for it, sure, why not?”

Why not, indeed? Especially when a one-fourth interest in thirty-three acres on Gravina Island, within a mile of the proposed construction, is owned by a woman named Nancy Murkowski, who happened to be the wife of the governor of Alaska and the mother of US Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). Senator Murkowski, you may recall, took to the Senate floor to defend the Bridge to Nowhere project when an attempt was made to use some of the money for New Orleans disaster relief instead.

“Someone else,” not the residents of Gravina Island, is paying for the Bridge to Nowhere. You, dear reader, are that “someone else.” Or, more precisely, your children and grandchildren, since establishment Republicans believe in using deficits to finance bloated government.

During the Bush–Hastert–DeLay years, if you were a member of Congress and played ball, you got a “bridge to nowhere.”

If you crossed them or opposed their schemes, you could get kicked- off your committee, and as punishment, legitimate federal responsibilities in your state might not get funded.

Jeff Flake spent much of his House career in purgatory for opposing earmarks and pork-barrel spending, but his 2012 election
to succeed dyed-in-the-wool pork-barrel spender Jon Kyl as Arizona’s junior senator is proof you can stick to your principles and succeed in Washington politics.