Obama’s Campaign Chair Voted “No”, McCain Voted “No”, But Guess Who Gets the Pass?

The Water Resources Development Act Of 2007 (WRDA)

Wikipedia has a history of this bill.

Originally, the WRDA was a bill authorizing the Secretary of the Army to construct projects improving rivers and harbors in the US. There were many projects, but some of them included improvements along the Illinois Waterway system, create a task force to help restore Louisiana’s ecosystem, and to help restore the Florida Everglades. This house bill costed out at around $1.5 billion.

When it got to the Senate, there was a problem with the earmark table. The font was so tiny it could not be searched electronically. This was blamed on the Government Printing Office. Amendments in the Senate jacked the cost up to around 13.2 billion and it increased the number of projects the Army Corps of Engineers were to accomplish from 40 to 50.

After passing both houses, the bill went to President Bush, who vetoed it as being too full of pork and not setting priorities for projects. No comment from Bush on what to do with a printing office that makes it too hard to read all the unimportant, [don't bother with that] earmarks.

Democratic leaders swiftly promised to override although spending watchdogs like Taxpayers for Common Sense agreed with Bush.

Read the rest ->

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group committed to being an “independent watchdog for American taxpayers,” commented that the bill was just a continuation of the political practices that led to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. It stated, “In the starkest terms, Katrina showed us that the time is long passed to end the political spoils system that has driven water project investment for more than a century. We need a modern, accountable and prioritized system to develop and award projects. It’s a message that Congress has failed to grasp.” While the bill provided funding for water projects around the country, it also contained “more than 800 parochial pork barrel projects for virtually every Congressional district in the nation.” According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, instead of dispersing funds by need, the legislators distributed as much as they could to their own districts.[5]

The Democratic led Congress patted itself on the back for the first override of a Bush veto.

John McCain voted against the bill. So did Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Here is what she said at the time:

I believe as a former auditor that we should be allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to direct funding based on a cost-benefit analysis. A cost-benefit analysis would allow the prioritization of projects based on the best value for our dollar.
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It’s hard to understand why in this area, unlike any other areas, not only are we in a position to decide level of funding, we’re going to decide every single project. Now, since this is so unique, it is even more important that we have complete transparency. Even though I was uncomfortable — even though I was uncomfortable requesting specific funding, I understood the unique nature of this bill, and I was comforted that I believed all of the projects would have a public airing, that they were going to be included in either the House or Senate bill, and there was not going to be any projects that were put into the authorization bill through the conference process.
 
Unfortunately, that happened. And that will bring me to the point of having to vote “no” on this bill because I believe very strongly in the principle that whatever we include must be included in either of the deliberations of the House or the Senate.
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We need to stop putting projects in conference reports that were not in either bill. Some will say: it doesn’t matter we have this backlog of all these progresses. Well, if it didn’t matter, why do we need to do it? And if it does matter, it ought to be important enough to be this one bill or the other.

After the bill passed, the NYT had this to say about its final version:

Readers will recall that the Democrats promised to upend the status quo as soon as they won majority control. . . Presented with another opportunity to reform the Corps — its weaknesses exposed by the levee failures in New Orleans and other misjudgments predating Hurricane Katrina — Democrats on the House transportation committee took a dive.

The committee approved a huge $40 [later corrected to $14-$15 billion] billion water resources development bill that is loaded with pork-barrel projects dear to Congress’s heart but, partly for that reason, is devoid of any serious reforms to an agency that over the years has inflated the economic payoffs of its projects while underestimating their potential damage to the environment.

Hopes for reform now lie with the Senate, where John McCain and Russell Feingold are still seeking, against heavy odds, to require two major and essential changes in the way the corps does business. One would require truly independent review of the design, cost and environmental consequences of all corps projects costing more than $40 million.

The second reform would require that projects be ranked by an interagency committee of experts in order of importance based on priorities like flood control and environmental restoration. This reform is aimed at Congress itself, since members tend to regard projects that benefit their own districts and electoral prospects as more important than any others, and are thus incapable of anything approaching dispassionate judgment,

Why does any of this “ancient history” that doesn’t seem to have helped today’s flooding victims matter, anyway?

Well, today at the US Conference of Mayors, Obama criticized McCain for that vote, saying that McCain considered levee and flood control projects pork, implying that McCain did not care about people affected by potential flooding.

And just the other day, Senator McCain traveled to Iowa to express his sympathies for the victims of the recent flooding. I’m sure they appreciated the sentiment, but they probably would have appreciated it more if he hadn’t voted against funding for levees and flood control programs, which he seems to consider pork. Well, we do have to reform budget earmarks, cut genuine pork, and dispense with unnecessary spending, as we confront a budget crisis left by the most fiscally irresponsible administration in modern times.

But when it comes to rebuilding America’s essential but crumbling infrastructure, we need to do more, not less. Cities across the Midwest are under water right now or courting disaster not just because of the weather, but because we’ve failed to protect them. Maintaining our levees and dams isn’t pork barrel spending, it’s an urgent priority, and that’s what we’ll do when I’m President. I’ll also launch a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years, and create nearly two million new jobs. The work will be determined by what will maximize our safety, security, and shared prosperity.

This seems disingenuous, a very political parsing of events. However, even more noteworthy is Senator McCaskill is a National Co-Chair of the “Obama for America” campaign. I guess by that calculus, Senator McCaskill didn’t really care about her constituents since some of those projects would have benefitted Missouri and she STILL couldn’t stand the pork.

It’s good to know Obama wants to bring attention to the current flooding in the midwest. But it seems to me he wants a “yes” vote on an absolutely huge, pork-laden bill (with extra superfine small print) to be read as care for specific issues he didn’t care enough about to put at the front of the line. McCain and Feingold didn’t want the pork but would have settled for putting certain projects at the top of the list.

At the time, McCaskill sided with McCain. But Obama doesn’t seem to hold her vote against her. Funny how that works. . .