The good news is that even though Barack Obama is the President of the United States, John McCain isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
His stupid earmark crusade has now become the central issue of Republican politics, where suddenly earmarks are the only problem, earmarks are the reason we have such huge deficits, earmarks are the mark of the beast, the sign of the devil, the locus of all that is evil in the natural and unnatural world.<\/p>\n
Does John McCain even begin to understand what an earmark is? (If you want to stop reading here, I\u2019ll skip ahead and tell you the answer: nope.)<\/p>\n
In case, perhaps, there are some out there as ignorant as Beavis McCain, the first thing you need to understand is that earmarks DO NOT ADD ONE DIME OF ADDITIONAL MONEY TO THE FEDERAL BUDGET. Got that? No? Then I will repeat it without capital letters. Earmarks don\u2019t add to the budget. At all. Not a penny. John McCain is either too stubborn or too stupid to understand this. (Probably both.)<\/p>\n
Do I have your attention now?<\/p>\n
Some context is important here. McCain and Co. are forgetting that the Constitution gives the power of the purse to the Congress, not the president.<\/p>\n
Indeed, when the Constitution was first drafted, the Founding Fathers presumed that the most powerful political entity in the country would be the House of Representatives. All spending bills were to originate in the House, with little or no input from the Executive Branch.<\/p>\n
Yet today, the balance of power has shifted drastically. Now it\u2019s the White House that submits the budget for Congress to approve with an up-or-down vote. Any budgetary directions that originate with the Congress are labeled \u201cearmarks,\u201d and it has become politically fashionable to view such direction as inherently wasteful or corrupt. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s important to examine the underlying premise here.<\/p>\n
When the Founders crafted the American experiment, they believed that those closest to the people were those who would spend public money most wisely. If we ignore the voice of Congress by eliminating earmarks, then we give President Obama absolute power to determine how federal money ought to be spent.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s unacceptable. And it\u2019s stupid besides.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut wait, Stallion!\u201d says Beavis. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be spending money on all these goofy little pet projects! We should cut the budget at the top!\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, yes. That\u2019s what he should be saying. But he\u2019s not.<\/p>\n
The question in Washington should be \u201chow much money should we spend?\u201d But Beavis skims over that question. The money\u2019s being spent. So who should determine how<\/span> it\u2019s spent? Beavis answers that question thinking he\u2019s answering the first one. Whether he realizes it or not, he\u2019s giving that power solely to the president. He\u2019s acting as if Obama would actually make his budget smaller if all earmarks were eliminated.<\/p>\n Which he wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n So, instead, we end up eating our own over an issue that\u2019s tangential at best to the problems we face, and in doing so, we cede more power and authority to a chief executive who wants to fundamentally restructure the nation\u2019s economy in truly frightening ways.<\/p>\n To quote Homer Simpson, democracy just doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thegood news is that even though Barack Obama is the President of the United States, John McCain isn\u2019t. His stupid earmark crusade has now become the central issue of Republican politics, where suddenly earmarks are the only problem, earmarks are the reason we have such huge deficits, earmarks are the mark of the beast, the ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}