When losing’s not enough

Today’s editorial page of the Wall Street Journal calls our attention to the fate of Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who was stripped of his seat on the House Judiciary Committee by the minority leader John Boehner (R-OH), apparently for his zealous attempts to save the US taxpayers some money. Flake is an ardent and outspoken critic of earmarking, which was the Republican Party’s preferred means of delivering pork to local districts, or as the Journal has it,

Mr. Flake should be getting a promotion to the leadership, given how prescient he was in warning his colleagues about the perils of their run-amok “earmarking.” He and a few comrades sponsored more than 40 House floor amendments last year to strip pork projects from spending bills. The National Taxpayers Union ranked him the most fiscally conservative member of the House. None of that sits very well with his House colleagues, who blame Mr. Flake for shining public attention on their spendthrift ways. They’re especially angry that he talked about this with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” which chose to run the program on election eve weekend.

Like members of medieval guilds and ancient priesthoods, politicians prefer to keep their decision-making process, their record of compromise and intrigue, a secret. In their eyes, Mr. Flake’s chief sin is in flouting this tradition. A perfect example of Mr. Flake’s method came this past June, when he offered amendments to the Defense Appropriations bill. He knew well that each amendment would not carry nearly enough votes to pass, but brought them forward anyway, perhaps relying on the idea that he might shame his colleagues into revising the bill, but of course, there is no shame in Washington, DC when it comes to spending money. According to a press release available on his congressional website, the Flake Amendments attempted to block funding for the following projects:

• $6,300,000 for the Wind Demonstration Project
• $1,000,000 for the Institute for Exploration at Mystic Aquarium in New London, Connecticut
• $1,000,000 for the Jason Foundation in Ashburn, Virginia
• $4,000,000 for the Center for Rotorcraft Innovation in Media, Pennsylvania
• $2,500,000 for the Illinois Technology Transition Center
• $2,500,000 for the Northwest Manufacturing Initiative
• $4,000,000 for the Lewis Center for Education Research in Apple Valley, California
• $1,000,000 for the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Program at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas
• $20,000,000 for the Leonard Wood Research Institute in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri

Of course, while none of these projects, at first glance, seem to be warranted on any level, they certainly are not warranted within the scope of a defense appropriations bill, for as Mr. Flake noted, “Simply put, every dollar we spend on earmarks in the Defense Appropriations bill is a dollar we can’t spend on the military.” It is perhaps too easy and hateful to cite these egregious earmarks while recalling how our soldiers in Iraq have endured a lack of the best-available equipment, such as body armor, and if these earmarks had been put forward in, say, a Transportation Appropriations bill, I’d be inclined not to mention them in this context, but this was, after all, a bill for so-called defense appropriations. So much for the patriotism of the Republican Party.

When you look up pork-barrel spending in the dictionary, the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill would be listed as Exhibit A. At the end of the day, Flake’s Republican colleagues seemed more perturbed by the negative publicity surrounding the Flake Amendments than the root causes of those amendments, and nothing perhaps demonstrates how far the Republican Party has strayed from its keystone positions of even 15 years ago. It seems that old boys like Mr. Boehner are now getting their delight at seeing Mr. Flake receive some measure of comeuppance by what can only be termed a demotion. As if Flake’s demotion was not enough, Mr. Boehner’s choice for the ranking minority member of the Appropriations Committee, Jerry Lewis (R-CA), confirms that the Party has learned nothing from its electoral massacre, or as the Journal points out,

Meanwhile, Mr. Boehner has asked California’s Jerry Lewis to remain the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee. As Chairman, Mr. Lewis allowed 13,997 earmarks in the 2005 budget. He is also under investigation for relationships with lobbyists amid allegations of “pay to play” earmarking. The Duke Cunningham payments-for-pork crimes happened on his watch. If Republicans truly believed in limited government, Mr. Flake would be running Appropriations and Mr. Lewis would be a back-bencher.

The travails of Mr. Flake point to the deep fissures running through the Republican Party, as the Party itself seems to be commanded by its worst elements. While President Bush continues to bear the brunt of the bad press, the Republicans’ congressional leadership of the past six years deserves an equal share of the blame for the parade of incompetence and corruption that has taken place. We are scarcely two months removed from the mid-term elections, and already, my Republican acquaintances seem content in chalking up the losses to ‘Bush’s War.’ But this past election was about much more than Mr. Bush or Iraq, and until Republicans acquire a stomach for confronting the enemy within, they will not recapture the middle of the political spectrum any time soon, or just as bad, they will merely join the Democrats in a race to the bottom, a contest pitting each party’s incompetents against each another.

Opponents of Mr. Flake are quick to point out his shortcomings; for example, after promising repeatedly to observe his self-imposed term limit, Mr. Flake broke that promise in 2006 and stood for election anyway (he, of course, won). I for one am glad he did, as a Republican Party bereft of his discipline and commitment to fiscal and budgetary responsibility would be a pathetic thing, and I sincerely hope this latest attempt to ‘discipline’ Mr. Flake doesn’t cut his appetite for taking on the big spenders who would prefer to work in the shadows.