Why Congress should reject the highway bill

We're expecting debate to start on Monday or Tuesday in both the House and Senate on the infamous Highway bill. The legislation is how Congress plans to inefficiently fund transportation projects all across the country over the next few years, and it's a decidedly inept process.


The Club for Growth has been all over this from the beginning. They have issued Key Vote Alerts against BOTH the House and Senate versions.

Republican leaders in the House are claiming that their bill is a positive step forward because it doesn't include earmarks, but it's still remarkably inefficient. It contains no spending cuts and is paid for by dubious and uncertain offsets. It's also a bailout, paid for by you and me, for all of the poor funding decisions made in the past. The Senate version was written, in part, by Sen. Barbara Boxer, so you know it's not a recipe for limited government. One of the dumbest provisions, thanks to Sen. Max Baucus, would use auto import tariffs to pay for more spending. If that passed into law, the floodgates would open for new tariffs to pay for new highway spending!


Why Congress Should Reject the Highway Bill

Washington Examiner, Andy Roth
February 9, 2012

Everyone knows that if you take the bacon off a greasy cheeseburger, it’s still packed with tons of calories and saturated fat. So why do members of Congress think cutting pork from the 2012 Highway Bill should suddenly make it appetizing to fiscal conservatives?


The Highway Bill — the last one expires at the end of March — traditionally uses gas tax receipts to fund highway construction and maintenance, but it also finances “enhancement projects” like bike paths, transportation museums, and the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” Just over the past seven years, reckless spending on pork projects like these have caused the federal government to bail out the Highway Trust Fund three times to the tune of nearly $30 billion, according to the Heritage Foundation.

GOP leaders are claiming that fiscal conservatives should support the current bill because it does away with these projects. They’re even including expanded oil drilling as a sweetener to the deal, even though it has nothing to do with the Highway Trust Fund. But the bill is still a huge waste of money. It doesn’t cut any spending. It still requires higher-than-market wages that are a sop to labor unions. Worst of all, it perpetuates a system based on central planning from Washington.

CONTINUED:http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2012/02/why-congress-should-reject-highway-bill/253041

Washington Examiner Editorial

Lame-duck Dems jam spending bill with 6,600 earmarks

By: Examiner Editorial 12/15/10 8:05 PM

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his allies are using the lame duck to push $1.2 trillion in spending. Gallup released a historic poll yesterday: The Democrat-controlled 111th Congress, now in its final, lame-duck session, is the most unpopular in the history of the pollster's surveys.

Given this week's events, it's not hard to see why. House Democrats' massive resistance to a popular, bipartisan package to prevent gargantuan income tax increases on all taxpayers in January shows they learned nothing from the 2010 election in which voters handed control of the lower chamber back to Republicans. The lame ducks keep acting as if they are still the top drakes in town, oblivious to the fact they were plucked and roasted by the voters on Nov. 2.

But if liberal intransigence in the House on taxes evinces a Congress that is "not getting it," leading Senate Democrats are going their colleagues one better by introducing a $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill that represents an act of stupefying political arrogance. This omnibus bill exemplifies a Democratic Congress that has been so preoccupied this year with its exceedingly unpopular legislative agenda that it failed to do its basic job: funding government. The Democrats who led the Senate and House refused to even pass a budget, as required by law and the Constitution, but now that they are losing power, they want one more spending spectacular before their terms end.

The 2,000-page omnibus bill contains 6,600 earmarks worth $8.3 billion, including funds for such national priorities as termite research and for a charity tied to the late House Democratic porkmeister John Murtha. The omnibus also funds Obamacare. It increases spending from last year's levels in a number of departments, immediately after an election in which runaway government spending was such a huge issue. Even worse, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his colleagues pushing this bill presented it as a political gun to the head for Senate Republicans who know the government will shut down if something isn't done by Saturday.

Senate Republicans and similarly responsible Democrats should reject the omnibus, as well as any other last-minute spending package introduced by the discredited leaders of the 111th Congress. With the tax-cut compromise headed toward final passage, the only appropriate spending measure for the lame-duck Senate to consider is one that funds the government at current levels until the new Congress is sworn in to start cleaning up the mess. Then they should go home.

If they don't, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., should, as he promised, demand a reading on the Senate floor of the full text of the omnibus and the proposed New START treaty, in order to slow-walk the irresponsible 111th Congress and prevent it from doing any more damage to the nation.


http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2010/12/examiner-editorial-lame-duck-dems-jam-spending-bill-6600-earmarks?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d0a045b6872ab87%2C0#ixzz18HF1xGJU

Pork Survives: Senate Rejects Earmarks Ban

WASHINGTON (The Blaze/AP) — The Senate has rejected a GOP bid to ban the practice of larding spending bills with earmarks — those pet projects that lawmakers love to send home to their states.


Democrats and a handful of Republicans combined to defeat the effort, which would have effectively forbidden the Senate from considering legislation containing earmarks like road and bridge projects, community development funding, grants to local police departments and special-interest tax breaks.
Read the full article here:  http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pork-survives-senate-rejects-earmarks-ban/

Earmarks Requested

Rep. G.K. Butterfield Jr. (-North Carolina, 1st) In Office - Earmarks Requested
http://www.legistorm.com/earmarks/details/member/153/Rep_G_K_Butterfield_NC/sort/bill/type/asc/year/all/page/5.html

Mitch McConnell fights GOP earmark ban

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is maneuvering behind the scenes to defeat a conservative plan aimed at restricting earmarks, setting up a high-stakes showdown that pits the GOP leader and his “Old Bull” allies against Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and a new breed of conservative senators.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/44888.html