More Money Down The Rathole

Jonathan Rothenberg notices a John Fund WSJ column about the Party Formerly Known For Fiscal Sanity:

With almost no debate and with precious few provisions for oversight, Congress has passed President Bush's mammoth $62 billion request for emergency Katrina relief. House Speaker Denny Hastert says the final total will "probably [be] under the cost of the highway bill" that Congress passed last month with a pricetag of $286.4 billion. [emphasis added]

Oh, God. That's supposed to be reassuring?

Despite such sums, there are few calls for offsetting cuts in other programs, apart from antiwar opportunists who see in Katrina a chance to undermine the Iraq effort. Last week Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma asked White House Budget Director Josh Bolten if he planned to continue to pursue budget reductions the Administration had already proposed in its January budget. Mr. Bolten said he "didn't have time" to worry about that.

All this leaves Mr. Coburn and other budget hawks wondering what has happened to what might be called "the Republican wing of the Republican Party." "The President could exercise leadership by insisting that we set priorities and offset the cost of Katrina relief by making changes elsewhere," says Mr. Coburn. "Sadly, we don't have that leadership."

Neither the White House nor Congress appears to be in any mood, for example, to revisit the highway bill's 6,373 "earmarks," or individual projects for members, worth $24.2 billion.

I'd like to believe that this stupendous "generosity" is being motivated by trademark GOP fear of being labeled as "mean" and "cruel" and lacking "compassion" for the victims of Katrina. Although given that their president is already being accused of mass murder in the Bayou, it baffles me why such standard Donk boilerplate should even make their political radar screens.

But the truth is, Republicans have gotten the hang of all the wrong levers of power. They can't - hell, they won't - use majority control to impose their will on the Democrats and maximize their own partisan self-interest, but brother have they figured out how the spending spigots work. Just when the Bush tax cuts were erasing the federal deficit with a blizzard of additional revenue, the Pachyderms have to open up Uncle Sam's wallet and spray those bucks right back out again.

I suppose even in the most "comitous" of political climates it would be politically difficult to vote against a disaster relief appropriation. But there's one factor in this instance that would have cinched a "nay" vote for me if I had been a member on either side of the Capitol: most of this tsunami of cash is going to the very state and local officials - Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin - that failed to prepare for a cat-5 hurricane, squandered the wealth of federal flood prevention funding they'd received in the past, completely frakked up the Katrina evacuation and post-storm relief efforts, and then tried to foist all the blame onto President Bush.

Maybe withholding federal assistance because of the latter would be a tad vindictive, but not the perfectly reasonable concern that this 62-bil is destined for the same corrupt fate as all the federal dough that preceded it. At the very least every last cent of that money should have iron-clad strings attached mandating precisely how it is and is not to be spent.

Instead the architects of the Katrina disaster are getting the best of both worlds: a vast new ocean of federal greenbacks in which to wallow naked, and the blame due them for their criminal negligence taken off their hands in "exchange" by the man in whose face they've spent the past two weeks pissing.

If I'm Nagin or Blanco, I'm hoping for another killer storm just as soon as Halliburton can finish recharging their secret weather control machines. This hurricane gig could become the Left's new cottage industry.