Inside the Sausage Factory: How Congressional Pork Gets Made

Everyone interested in the myriad complicated ways in which money gets (mis)managed in Washington should read Robert Novak’s column today, but here’s the most important graf:

During a confusing week on Capitol Hill, lawmakers engaged in games difficult for insiders to understand and incomprehensible for ordinary voters. As the first Congress controlled by Democrats since 1994 nears the end of its first year, the desire to bring home the bacon trumped concern over the falling dollar, the crisis in Pakistan and the continuing conflict in Iraq.

Novak goes on to detail how Democrats have used obscure rules changes and slippery floor tactics to try to sneak through about a billion dollars in earmarks.

That’s right: A billion dollars in earmarks.

A billion dollars is a pretty tough number to wrap your mind around.  Think about a million dollar home: That penthouse condo in the city, that three-car garage home out in the suburbs, that older row-house in a New York borough.

Now think about a thousand of those — a giant, sprawling neighborhood filled with million dollar properties.  That’s a billion dollars worth of property, and that’s how much legislators tried to sneak through for their pet projects.

The other part of the problem, of course, is that even with the public sentiment firmly against excessive spending and earmarks, few legislators want to be seen as failing to bring home the bacon.  And legislators on both sides of the aisle work together to make sure that spending for each other’s districts gets protected.

So the trick — and it’s a tough one — is for the public not just to say that don’t like pork to pollsters, but to reject big-spending by legislators in their own district.   In other words, just saying you don’t like pork isn’t enough.