Smells like a pig

"We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review."

-- Barack Obama, Jan. 6, 2009.

Perhaps President Obama is the leader of some political party other than that of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Hawthorne, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Barbary Coast.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and other opponents of the corrupt process of attaching earmarks to often unrelated spending bills, have been attacking the more than 8,000 pet projects stuffed into the president's $410 billion spending plan. But some big spenders are actually fighting back.

For example, allocating $1.8 million to study methods of controlling the smell of pig dung stinks to high heaven in these times of economic struggle, Sen. Coburn insists. "Pigs stink. We know why," said Sen. Coburn on the Senate floor last week. "So is that a priority right now?" But Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, defended the pet project that he himself had larded into the massive spending bill, without subjecting it to the normal hearing process: "In farm country, manure and odor management are profoundly serious challenges that can be mitigated through scientific research," Sen. Harkin squealed.

Senate Majority Leader Reid came up with his own justification for earmarks: "I have an obligation to the people of Nevada to make sure there is not some bureaucrat down in one of these big offices in Washington, D.C., who determines every penny spent in Nevada," he explained.

The best way to do that, of course, would be to ensure fewer Nevada dollars flow to Washington in the form of federal tax collections in the first place, allowing them to instead be retained and spent right here, without any Beltway bureaucratic oversight whatever.

But Sen. Feinstein of San Francisco may have been the most candid in admitting what the world's most supposedly sober deliberative body is actually up to, these days.

On Monday, after Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., lambasted the spending bill and its earmarks, Appropriations Committee member Sen. Feinstein gave an impassioned defense of the practice. "Yes, I fight for funds for my state," she said. "That's what I came here to do. Candidly, why be an appropriator if you can't help your state?"

Actually, less than two months ago, Sen. Feinstein provided her own answer when she and her cohorts once again cynically took their oath to "protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," a document which instructs the senators they are there to exercise a certain limited set of powers for the specific purpose of "providing for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" -- not "the specific welfare of the state from which they shall have come."

The Constitution most certainly does not authorize the expenditure of limited federal tax dollars for research into the causes of Iowa pig stink. Or does Sen. Feinstein believe the people of California should provide her with a kerchief and an eye patch, a cutlass and a pistol, the better to fight the other 99 pirates there for her fair share of their ill-gotten booty?

Why does the federal government currently run a deficit massive enough to distort the credit markets, carrying a mind-boggling load of debt which -- barring default -- our children and grandchildren will be sold into virtual slavery to pay off?

Federal spending could be trimmed by more than half, overnight, if our delegates to Washington merely began asking, of each proposed allocation, "Where, in those 390 words of Article I, Section 8, which list all the things on which we're authorized to spend money, does this one appear?"

And let's have none of the old "general welfare" chestnut. As George Mason University economics professor and syndicated columnist Walter Williams again laboriously pointed out this week: "In a letter to Edmund Pendleton, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, said, 'If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.' "

Pig stink research? It's perfectly legal. It may even be worthwhile. But as it has nothing to do with coining money, establishing post offices, granting patents, punishing piracy or floating a navy, Congress has no authority to fund it. Period.

In cheerful, blatant and fiscally disastrous defiance of which, the Senate on Tuesday evening voted 62-35 to end debate and send their latest, humongous, $410 billion pork-filled spending bill (with its 8,570 separate earmarks) to the White House, where President Obama -- the sworn enemy of all earmarks, it should be recalled -- happily signed it, but vowed to put an end to this insidious practice ... next time.