How To Judge Elected Representatives

Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=324685685182069

By WALTER R. BORNEMAN | Posted Wednesday, April 15, 2009 4:20 PM PT

History offers fascinating perspectives. The founding fathers would be aghast at the mere suggestion of federal dollars being spent on everything from swine odor in Iowa to blueberry production in Georgia, not to mention pesky cormorants in Michigan.

The first major attempt to pass a bill that constituted what might be termed pork barrel spending occurred in 1817.

South Carolina's John C. Calhoun proposed to use $1.5 million to improve the nation's fledgling system of roads and canals.

The National Road west from Cumberland, Maryland, was already under construction, but Calhoun's plan promoted multiple projects — internal improvements, they were called — to benefit other transportation arterials around the country.

It did not enjoy smooth sailing.

New England was opposed, as that region generally was to any measure that encouraged westward expansion and pulled the commercial and political fulcrum of the country away from Boston.

The South, despite Calhoun leading the charge, was divided, wary that the country's midsection might benefit more than it.

Pennsylvania cheered the loudest in support of the measure because it saw the corridor west from Philadelphia as a natural beneficiary and Pittsburgh the logical transportation hub west of the Appalachians.

Because of these sectional concerns, Calhoun's bill narrowly passed the House by two votes and the Senate by five.

But then Calhoun got a real shock. President James Madison drew him aside at a reception at the president's temporary quarters — the Executive Mansion was still being re-constructed from its torching by the British—and told Calhoun point blank that he could not sign the bill on constitutional grounds.

Architect of the Constitution and strict constructionist that he was, Madison felt that such an appropriation for internal improvements was not within the enumerated powers granted Congress.

He also feared that it would dangerously disrupt the partition of powers and the intended focus between the state and federal governments. Madison vetoed the bill one day before his term ended.

Thereafter, federal funding of internal improvements became a hotly debated issue, with Henry Clay's emerging Whig Party being generally in favor and Andrew Jackson's Democrats opposed to such appropriations.

In 1846, Jackson's handpicked political heir, James K. Polk, vetoed a then-staggering appropriation of $1,378,450 (the entire national debt was only about $17 million) for forty separate improvement projects to rivers and harbors on the Great Lakes.

"Should this bill become law," President Polk prophetically told Congress, "the principle which it establishes will inevitably lead to large and annually increasing appropriations and drains upon the Treasury, for it is not to be doubted that numerous other localities . . . will demand, through their representatives in Congress, to be placed on an equal footing with them."

Polk stopped the pork in 1846, but Congress has let the pig loose again and again.

Ironically, Polk's Democrats went on to become the free-spending Democrats of FDR's New Deal and in subsequent Congresses, Republicans, too, became transfixed with bringing the bacon home to their respective districts.

The Republican Party platforms of 1856 and 1860 added railroads to the long-debated category of internal improvements and not only called for a railroad to the Pacific, but also urged substantial government aid in its construction.

Democrats supported the railroad, but the party maintained its longstanding opposition to the direct use of federal dollars for the effort, particularly if the route was to be a northerly one.

During the Civil War — with Southern Democrats absent — the Republican-controlled Congress generously funded the first transcontinental railroad with guaranteed bonds and land grants.

In the war's aftermath, heated political posturing sought to confer similar benefits on various southern transcontinental routes.

But at least these transportation projects were of a scope that generally qualified as "national interest."

By 1896, national interest had been watered down to the point that one satirical cartoon featured a California lobbyist "hooking a chunk of River and Harbor Pork out of a Congressional Pork Barrel."

After the New Deal, the floodgates were open. Attempts to close them frequently met with political rejection.

"As groups win their battle for special expenditures," Illinois Democrat Senator Paul Douglas warned to no avail, "they lose the more important war for general economy."

Douglas attributed his 1966 loss for a fourth term in part to his unwillingness to "deliver" federal pork to his state.

Despite enormous economic priorities and the 2008 election year hype of Alaska's now infamous "bridge to nowhere," pork remains king, unchallenged in Congress save for a few courageous critics. Meanwhile, Massachusetts — its 1817 opposition to internal improvements long forgotten — has channeled billions of dollars of federal pork into Boston's "Big Dig."

When it comes to tax dollars entrusted to its care, Congress appears beyond reforming itself. There is a collective lack of fortitude to turn off the spigot.

Ultimately, only voters can decide that their elected representatives' effectiveness should be judged not by tax dollars directed from federal coffers, but rather by how much of their own tax dollars they get to keep in the first place.

Of that, James Madison and James K. Polk would approve.

Borneman's biography of James K. Polk, "Polk, The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America" (Random House, 2008), has just been released in paperback.