Global View

Meet the New Special-Interest U.S. Congress

By George Melloan
1,030 words
2 August 2005
The Wall Street Journal
A11
English
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session."

Whoever uttered those rueful words -- Mark Twain? Benjamin Franklin? Nineteenth-century New York Judge Gideon J. Tucker? -- voiced the exasperation Americans often feel toward their lawmakers. Taxpayers can rest easier now that the denizens of Capitol Hill have gone home for their August holiday. But those worthies have left behind a trail littered with the favors they've done for their special friends at the expense of the taxpaying masses. And in just a month, they'll be back doing it again.

The McCain-Feingold act, the current embodiment of years of campaign finance "reforms," was peddled as a law that would "take money out of politics." Oh, sure. Campaign spending set a record last fall, much of it provided indirectly from shadowy sources rather than up front and in public. Americans in some distant past had a largely unrestricted right to support candidates with their contributions, but a Congress uncomfortable with free choice chose to limit that power.

A case can be made that we are seeing the result of this limitation in the performance of the current Congress, which seems to have less regard than its predecessors for the broad public interest. Before last week's House vote on the Central American Free Trade Agreement, sugar barons and textile magnates were twisting members' arms to vote "no" and hand free trade a major defeat. Cafta squeaked through by only two votes.

This near fiasco for U.S. trade policy raises a question: How did lobbyists for a few business interests with little overall economic importance almost overwhelm the broad interests of the U.S. and its trading partners? One possible answer is that narrow interests can wield such power because they exercise an increasingly important influence within the electoral process. It might well be that campaign-finance restrictions have so narrowed the financial support base for lawmakers that they have become more beholden to lobbies with the cash and know-how to defeat anyone who doesn't toe the line.

The free-trade battle is not over by any means, by the way. Reportedly, the House leadership had to promise the wavering lawmakers new barriers to Chinese textiles to win Cafta support. That's just what the U.S. needs, a foolish protectionist policy that will give China's hard-liners a plausible argument that the U.S. is China's enemy and should be dealt with accordingly.

Before recess, the House also rushed to approve two big spending bills covering who knows what. In both the highway and energy bills the main concern was not the price tag or whether the money would be spent efficiently. It was to ensure that every member got a fair share for his state or district. As noted in a Journal editorial, the $286.4 billion for highway projects is well over the limit set by the president. There's pork for all, including a project in Democrat Jim Clyburn's South Carolina district widely known as the "Bridge to Nowhere."

The $66 billion energy bill also was about fair shares, but mainly across the ideological spectrum. To keep enviroradicals quiet, there is money for windmills, a 19th-century technology now cluttering the landscape from coast to coast, killing wildfowl and disturbing the neighbors. Oh yes, the flopping blades occasionally generate a few kilowatts of "renewable energy," if the wind happens to be blowing.

Apologists for all this profligacy argue that at least it "creates jobs." But none of those jobs comes with any cost-benefit test of the type that a private venture would have to pass to get funding. Thus there is no measure of whether the money spent adds or subtracts from human well-being.

There is very little concern for anything other than dividing up the tax-and-borrowing revenues so that every member, along with his coterie of supporters, gets a share. That the projects financed often involve exercising the power of eminent domain to grab someone's land or put up a noisy windmill on yonder hill bears out that ancient warning that property is never secure when the legislature is in session.

Congress knows it has a spending problem, just as alcoholics are aware that they have a drinking problem. The late Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan once said to Journal editors, "It doesn't do any good for you to yell at us -- we just can't help it."

He may have been right. Congress has made various stabs at setting up a "congressional budget process" that would reconcile the various spending bills and keep them within some agreed-upon total. But somehow the machinery just never seems to work. It keeps getting overwhelmed by the pressures of political logrolling.

Republicans argue that they have to give Democrats a share of the booty to buy cooperation on important matters. But the Democratic minority seems totally ungrateful, as evidenced by its blocking of President Bush's nominee for United Nations ambassador, John Bolton, from an up-or-down vote in the Senate.

A broader argument is that money holds the republic together. By sharing it out, the federal government buys the loyalty of a broad variety of constituencies, thereby insuring national unity. In politics, "fairness" is a very big word, even if it is only applied to those who receive federal largesse and seldom to those taxpayers who cough it up.

If "fairness" is the guiding principle, perhaps it should apply to the equal treatment under the law of everyone who wants to express his constitutional right to free expression by supporting, financially, the candidate of his choice. The result might be that members of Congress would become less beholden to special interests and more concerned with the common good.

In the final analysis, of course, the U.S. has a form of representative government that for all its faults somehow seems to work better than most others. Still, it is a relief when the legislature goes on holiday and Americans can all feel a little safer.

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