[NYTr] An Enduring Corruption: Why Congress Won't Reform

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterp8nch - Nov 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler11192007.html

An Enduring Corruption

Why Congress Won't Reform

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER

Having endured the Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham saga up close
and personal for the last two years, most recently in the form of Mr.
Brent Wilkes' conviction on all 13 counts for the corrupt acts that he
and Cunningham performed, San Diego has had a ring-side seat on modern
sleaze in Congress.

Since the Dukester's resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives
in November 2005, there has been a lot of congressional activity to
change how members of Congress do business with lobbyists like Mr.
Wilkes and how Congress enacts those "earmarks" that Cunningham chased
so assiduously to earn his bribes. Voters in San Diego County have a
right to think that there is potentially a positive side to the mess;
the scandal could produce reforms to retard at least some of the more
painfully obvious abuses.

Sorry. It hasn't happened, and it's not going to.

I worked on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for 31 years as a staffer
for Republican and Democratic senators, helping them chase down pork
and stay cozy with the network of lobbyists that pay huge sums to
members of Congress to keep federal tax dollars flowing through the
congressional pork process. Despite dozens of pages of new rules and
"reforms," and thousands of sanctimonious speeches, nothing has
changed. In some ways, legislative ethics are now even worse than when
felon Cunningham was selling himself in return for used cars, old
furniture, prostitutes and other goodies.

Just after the November 2006 elections that brought the Democrats into
the majority in Congress, the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi,
D-San Francisco, promised "the most ethical Congress ever." Her
delivery on part of that promise was a new set of rules for the pork
process on Capitol Hill. They permit any spending bill to be ruled "out
of order" (and therefore dead) unless it is accompanied by a list of
earmarks in the bill. The identity of each earmark's congressional
sponsor must be displayed along with "the name and address of the
intended recipient" or "the intended location" of the earmark and a
certification that no member of Congress has any financial interest in
the earmark. In other words, the reform sheds "sunshine" on earmarks.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

The new sunlight is more deceptive than illuminating; each earmark's
description is authored not by an objective entity, but by the
earmark's congressional sponsor. In other words, Duke Cunningham, for
example, would have been allowed to explain without fear of
contradiction why Brent Wilkes' earmarks should stay in the defense
budget as essential national security spending. Sen. Barbara Boxer,
D-Calif., can today freely articulate every reason the Boeing Company
feeds her as to why a few billion more should be spent on C-17
transport aircraft the secretary of defense doesn't want. She will not
be required to explain what other defense spending will be axed to make
her superfluous C-17s available, nor that they will never arrive in
time to play a useful role in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sen. Boxer and all other congressional porkers would be crazy not to
comply with the new "anti-pork" reforms. They are nothing less than
free advertising. None of the pork in this new "reformed" system will
be objectively evaluated by or honestly described to anyone. We won't
know if it is actually needed, how much it will really cost, or whether
spending on something else would be a better idea.

But it gets worse. The so-called "sunshine" that the Pelosi reforms
have shed on earmarks is highly selective. The new definition of
earmarks excludes huge amounts of pork. The Washington, D.C.-based
watchdog organization Taxpayers for Common Sense found 70 earmarks that
the House Appropriations Committee failed to identify in its new fiscal
year 2008 Department of Defense Appropriations bill, adding to the
1,339 earmarks the committee did disclose. These unlisted 70 earmarks
were fat ones: They more than doubled the legislation's pork bill from
$3 billion to $6.5 billion. When the Senate got to its version of the
bill in September, it put in 936 earmarks amounting to $5.2 billion.
Earlier this month, the House and Senate reconciled the differences
between their two versions of the legislation and sent it to the
president. It's now law. Analysts are still sorting out the complete
pork bill, but it already looks to be an amount higher than what either
the House or Senate separately passed; after all, porking is an
additive process.

Further, the pork process for defense spending will not be over if and
when this new defense bill is enacted. There is still the supplemental
spending Congress must pass to pay for the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the congressional porkers have big plans there too.
They include almost $3 billion for those additional C-17s the Pentagon
says it doesn't want, but which Sen. Boxer, and many others, will jam
into the bill.

In toto, there is an excellent chance that Congress will top last
year's pork bill for defense spending. For fiscal year 2007, the
Republican Congress enacted 2,646 defense earmarks for $10.5 billion.
Given the course the Democratic "reform" Congress is on, that will be
an easy mark to beat. Should this occur, it will be done in spite of
the promise from both the House and Senate Democratic leadership to cut
pork spending in half.

And what about bribes? That system is alive and well also. They will
surely come from the appreciative corporations for the ever-compliant
porkers. Payments in the form of used cars, furniture and women will be
rare ---- as has always been the case; payment in the form of campaign
contributions will be routine. The only difference between the
Cunningham form of payment and the latter is that Congress has deemed
thank you payments in the form of cash to campaigns to be perfectly
legal. After all, they write the laws.

There is a simple reason why Congress has not changed any fundamentals:
Senators and representatives still see their political survival
dependant on their ability to "bring home the bacon." Any reduction in
spending for a congressional district will be immediate grounds for a
political attack in an election. Less pork will prompt an allegation
that the member of Congress either "doesn't care" or "can't produce."
Sitting members are deathly afraid of any such attack and behave
accordingly.

Those attacks will not just come from political opponents; they will
also come from local media who keep track of such things. They will
also come from the voters, who think that "bringing home the bacon" is
a measure of a good representative.

In the final analysis, it is not the members of Congress we should
attack for their phony reforms. They are only doing what they know we
want them to do. When we change, they will.


[Winslow T. Wheeler worked for Republican and Democratic senators and
the Government Accountability Office over a 31 year career on Capitol
Hill. He joined the Center for Defense Information in 2002. He is
author of The Wastrels of Defense and a contributor to Dime's Worth of
Difference.]