President Bush signed a massive, pork-filled $286.4B transportation bill today. According to the AP article, the bill was signed at a Caterpillar plant in Montgomery, Illinois, which is within Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s district.

The bill was widely supported by both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and House. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: there is nothing politicians love more than pork, and this bill had it in spades.

Boston Globe Columnist Jeff Jacoby has the best synopsis of the bill that I’ve seen so far:

Huge as the bill was, it wasn’t quite huge enough for Representative Don Young of Alaska, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. ”It’s not as big as what he’d like,” a committee spokesman said, ”but is still a very good bill and will play a major role in addressing transportation and highway needs.”

One wonders what more Young could have wanted. The bill funnels upward of $941 million to 119 earmarked projects in Alaska, including $223 million for a mile-long bridge linking an island with 50 residents to the town of Ketchikan on the mainland. Another $231 million is earmarked for a new bridge in Anchorage, to be named — this is specified in the legislation — Don Young’s Way. There is $3 million for a film ”about infrastructure that demonstrates advancements in Alaska, the last frontier.” The bill even doffs its cap to Young’s wife, Lu: The House formally called it ”The Transportation Equity Act — a Legacy for Users,” or TEA-LU. [emphasis added]

Christmas didn’t come early just for Alaska. Meander through the bill’s endless line items and you find a remarkable variety of ”highway” projects, many of which have nothing to do with highways: Horse riding facilities in Virginia ($600,000). A snowmobile trail in Vermont ($5.9 million). Parking for New York’s Harlem Hospital ($8 million). A bicycle and pedestrian trail in Tennessee ($532,000). A daycare center and park-and-ride facility in Illinois ($1.25 million). Dust control mitigation for rural Arkansas ($3 million). The National Packard Museum in Ohio ($2.75 million). A historical trolley project in Washington ($200,000). And on and on and on.

[…]

Arizona Senator John McCain, who voted no, called the bill a ”monstrosity” and wondered whether it will ever be possible to restore fiscal sanity to Congress. If ”the combination of war, record deficits, and the largest public debt in the country’s history” can’t break lawmakers’ addiction to spending, he asked, what can? ”It would seem that this Congress can weather any storm thrown at it, as long as we have our pork life-saver to cling to.”

How is the blogosphere reacting? Power Line doesn’t dare to mention the bill at all (a serach through the archives reveals nothing.) Of course, this is because Power Line isn’t conservative, it’s Republican.

But while many blogs have yet to post a reaction to the President’s signing of the bill, a Redstate.org Aug. 4th and 5th promoted diary puts it well:

Conservatives owe their loyalty to our principles, not Republicans in Washington – not even those Republicans with whom we know and have worked for and with over the years. We conservatives have an obligation to speak out about how Republicans have betrayed us and what we believe. We need to communicate with our organizations and constituents to make clear that our interests, as conservatives, are being seriously undermined by this new political class: long-serving Republicans in Washington more interested in keeping power than doing right by the Constitution and the American people.

If the Democrats had engaged in this level of wasteful spending, every Conservative in America would be raising their voice. We must not do less when the Republicans act like Democrats, lest we been seen – rightly – as political hacks having no principles, only concerned with power. The price of silence is hypocrisy.

One can only be reminded of 1998 when the Republican Congress – just four years after taking power, went on a similar spending spree – only to watch grassroots activists desert them in November. The GOP lost House seats in the second midterm election of a Democratic President, a failure almost unheard of in American politics.

Indeed. It will be interesting to see how party-line blogs on both sides react. M y guess? Most won’t even mention it.

Does anyone want to make bets on how many total vetoes President Bush will have exercised by the time his second term is up? My money’s on zero.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 at 11:55 by Ian and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.