On Tap

Frankly, this category had me flummoxed for most of the day. I was trying to think of something that might go on a list like this. You know: Some example of government spending that would offend even the most free spending liberal Democrat.

But then I considered the category a bit more, and concluded that I need not be so linear in my thinking. I decided that a $500 hammer was far too trite for this great category. Instead, I started contemplating government generally, and all of the waste that results from government action (and inaction.)

So, for my selection as Biggest Government Waste for 2007, I choose the entire Congressional appropriations process.

In theory, under the rules of the House and the Senate, each year, Congress is supposed to pass about a dozen appropriations bills to fund various aspects of the government. This approach allows specialized committees to consider the specific needs of particular agencies and deal with thorny policy questions.

But over the past decade, Congress has failed nearly every year to fund the government by the book.

Instead, after months of doing nothing, Congressional leaders get together and lump most of the appropriations into one big, unreadable bill. In Capitol Hill parlance, this is called an Omnibus Spending bill, or omnibus for short.

This year, the omnibus will appropriate money for the entire government in one massive omnibus. As Bob Novak reports, the bill was written by Democratic leaders in secret. No member of Congress will have time to read the bill before it becomes law. And the omnibus will, as ever, be corroded with pork barrel spending.

Why can’t Congress do its primary job in 9 months? Who knows. With this Congress, ineptitude seems to be at the top of the list of possibilities.

But one thing is beyond doubt: Congress’s inability to do its job is costing us trillions. And that, friends, is the biggest government waste imaginable.

More on this year’s omnibus here from the Associates Press and here from Rob Bluey. And here’s something I wrote a couple of years ago on the same topic. Seems that not much has changed.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds points me to this awesome new blog from Heritage all about the broken approps process.

Jim: Cam gave our readers a taste of it on this site, but the week that Harry Reid and the Democrats in the Senate tried to make an out-of-context Rush Limbaugh comment out to be the equivalent of the MoveOn.org Betray-Us ad, Cam let loose with one of the most ferocious and hilarious rants I’ve ever witnessed. The theme was that Reid, by deciding to focus the time and energy of the Senate into a denunciatory campaign on a radio talk show host, in a transparent attempt to deflect attention from the political debacle that was MoveOn’s campaign, was retarded (no offense to the genuinely mentally handicapped) and that Cam was tired of Reid and stupid politicians trying to force America into taking the short bus. Cam articulated the exasperation, incredulousness, fury and exhaustion that I suspect a lot of Americans of all political stripes are feeling. (It almost gets you sympathizing with Ron Paul’s crowd.)

For wasting America’s time and energy, Harry Reid’s phony war - in which I guess he would be a “phony soldier” - is my nomination for the Biggest Government Waste of 2007.

Cam: Boy, these are getting tough. I mean, it’s easy to pick on government programs… but “biggest” implies a veritable buttload of money. So my original choice of “gun buyback” programs probably isn’t big enough to pick on.

But how about this: the District of Columbia’s decision to defend its utter and complete ban on the use of firearms for self-defense in your own home. I have no idea how much money will be spent defending this decision all the way up to the Supreme Court, but given the fact that large majorities of Americans believe in the right to keep and bear arms, it seems incredibly wasteful for the District to spend a single damn dime on its effort to continue to deny residents their right of self defense.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at December 17, 2007 - 9:38 pm and is filed under Conservativism, On Tap Awards, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.