Over at The American Mind, Sean Hackbarth took a look at the Emergency Appropriations bill; he's had to go on cholesterol medication just from reading it through.

I went through his digest of the spending spree: some of the allocations looked like they might even be legitimate, but not without adequate debate. Which brings us to the bad habit of treating normal spending as an emergency. Congress is supposed to provide oversight to the Executive Branch, but who provides oversight to them? A few bloggers like Sean, and that's it:

Slogging through the 2007 Emergency Supplemental put together by House Democrats you wonder what the purpose of the document really is. If you thought it was to fund continuing military operations in Iraq you’re partly right. You’d also be right if you thought it was to pay off constituencies at taxpayers’ expense. “Buying their way to defeat” sums up the Democrats’ efforts here.

But of course the Republicans have never been slouches in the "spending like drunken sailors" department, as James Joyner points out:

ThereÂ’s not much partisan hay to be made here since, goodness knows, the Republicans had more pork than a Jimmy Dean sausage factory in their bills. It does demonstrate, however, that promises to come to Washington and impose spending restraint are almost always laughably hollow. WeÂ’re barely two months into the new Democratic Congress and already any pretense is over.

This is the kind of thing that I tend to lay at Bush's feet: it's not as if he can credibly threaten to veto the bill. His track record there is abysmal, and he's not even particularly cooperative about efforts to create more transparency in spending. This is the President who led the charge to save our endangered earmarks, after all.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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