While I won’t for a moment dispute the image of the Republican Congress as spendthrifts, the problem with judging legislators on the pork they put into bills is that there’s no clear record or measure of this. Pork gets inserted as part of complex negotiations over bills. I’d love to see a specific statistical breakdown of who requested what pork in which bills. Even then, it reflects on individuals, and not a full voting record. Votes apply to an entire omnibus of legislation. Nobody can vote on specific line-items. You want Iraq war appropriations? You vote for bike paths in Gotham City. You want better bridges in a highway funding bill? You pay for a Museum of the Grotesque in Smallville, USA. You want hurricane relief? Only if you vote for a Public Service Centre in honour of some politician who wouldn’t know public service if he tripped over it.

By contrast, anti-pork bills are discrete and independent, each subject to a full vote. Therefore, they are easily measured. Provided the Club for Growth did not omit anti-pork bills that reflected unfavourably on their favourite representatives (on which I’llgive them the benefit of the doubt in the absence of contrary evidence), the conclusions are unequivocally correct. Facts aren’t dishonest.

That doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination exonerate Republicans on spending. Most politicians bow to the selfish wishes of their own constituencies in this regard. But it does debunk the notion that spending restraint is a good reason for supporting America’s Democrats.

Dismissing Coburn and DeMint as “two right-wing Senators” before quoting the very same senators in your rebuttal…

As I understand it, the 65 anti-pork measures (15 before the Senate and 50 before the House) were the only specific anti-pork bills on the table. They pale into insignificance against the thousands of earmarks, true, but they weren’t cherry-picked.

The point was that I’ve been told I should, as a free-marketeer, support the Democrats for their fiscal responsibility, given the Republican Congress’s profligacy record. I agreed that the Republican Congress has been remarkably profligate. In fact, I feel they betrayed the very reason they ousted the Democrats in 1994. However, I dispute that the current Democratic Congress is any better. And unlike earmarks, on which no specific votes take place (the larger bill that contains them is what legislators vote on), the voting record on specific anti-pork measures bears this out.

Incidentally, I salute Robert Byrd and David Obey for the moratorium on earmarks in joint resolution 20. Would that the other Democrats (including the front-running presidential candidates) were as committed to fiscal responsibility.

“The number of earmarks swelled from 546 projects worth $3.1 billion in 1991 to almost 14,000 projects worth $27 billion in 2005, according to Citizens Against Government Waste in Washington, an early pioneer in providing data on special-interest projects. The figures dropped last year to 2,658 projects worth $13 billion.”

This is from Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) (cited at http://mediamatters.org/items/200711150003). How does the organization explain the big drop in earmarks? “This lesser barrel of pork can be attributed to the efforts of Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who prevented the enactment of nine appropriations bills in December, 2006, and the subsequent moratorium on earmarks announced and enforced by the House and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairmen David Obey (D-Wis.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) in H. J. Res. 20, the bill that funds the government for the remainder of fiscal 2007.”

So you, respectively the right-wing “Club for Growth”, are judging legislators by how they voted on just 15, resp. 50, hand-picked projects, out of a total of many many thousands? Who are you kidding??? And you call this “evidence” that “Democrats have shown themselves to be much worse than Republicans in terms of fiscal responsibility”? Conveniently overlooking that Democratic leaders have just radically brought down the number of earmarks by enforcing a moratorium, something completely unheard of during 12 years of Republican regime?

“And there are actually people out there gullible enough to take this seriously?”

But you, and your famous “Club for Growth”, are judging legislators by how they voted on 15 individual hand-picked amendments. Fifteen! Which fifteen? Who picked them, and who declared them to be benckmarks of “fiscal responsibility”? Well, the Club for Growth did, the right-wing organization providing your famous “facts”. Here’s from their web site: “These amendments were offered by taxpayer heroes Senators Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Jim DeMint (R-SC).” In other words, your “Club for Growth” defines fiscal responsibility as “voting for fifteen amendments offered by two right-wing senators”. Nice try.

You know what, I can do that myself. I can pick a handful of measures that I like, declare them to be a benchmark of ethical behavior, and calculate score cards, attributing low or high ethics scores to legislators. It may happen that Republicans get low ethics scores on my score cards, well you know, that’s not my fault. It’s all objective facts. It’s all on the public record. No need to dodge the issues

Neither I, nor the Club for Growth, disputed that the Congresses of the last few years have been profligate, that Republicans have been guilty of spending excess, or, for that matter, that it is in the nature of an elected legislator — “right-wing” or otherwise — to try to bring home the bacon for their state.

But instead of just believing rhetoric, or labelling people according to your preconceptions, it helps to know which legislators in fact voted which way on which issues. Especially when they continue to withhold a line-item veto from the president.

And on this evidence, Democrats have shown themselves to be much worse than Republicans in terms of fiscal responsibility. This only makes Republican legislators the lesser of two evils on public spending. It doesn’t make them models of restraint. But it is a useful basis for comparison.

The Democrats now have a majority in Congress. They won control with loud promises to clean up corruption and curb spending. On the face of it this appeared to be trivially easy to do — after all, even the Republican base was disgusted with the GOP Congress for exactly this reason.

Not only haven’t they done so, but their votes show they turned out even worse. We can now judge them by their actions, not just by the nobility of their promises.

Read something real, and then come back and discuss reality: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/07/0080635