×
PORK PRESERVES. This rather misses the point of what the GOP did last week:
The hero of the lame-duck session was freshman Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina. He was instrumental in blocking a Senate-House conference on a military construction appropriations bill, which would then be used as the last train out of town to carry pork.He didn't block the bill, he delayed it. DeMint and a handful of other Republican congresscritters kicked a couple bills down the road, the better to not be blamed for them. Fair enough -- that's politics. But they did nothing to actually eliminate the pork; they just removed the GOP's fingerprints and made sure Democrats would control the process. Funny how a massive defeat focuses the moral righteousness. Meanwhile, Tom Coburn's bill to force a pork report card, "under which the Pentagon would grade earmarks on a scale of A to F," seems interesting, depending on how the grading body is set up. Democrats and Republicans united to defeat it, though. The more things change, etc.--Ezra Klein
