President Bush said last week he doesn't think Congress should raise the gas tax to pay for new bridges until it does something first about all the gas tax money wasted on so-called "earmark" projects—projects that don't meet federal standards but get done anyway as political favors to Congress members' supporters back home. Makes sense.
But the president tried to blame earmarks on Democrats and liberals. Doesn't make sense.
The Belo Building has two faces. How appropriate.
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Hey, Mr. President: Take a look at Dallas, the city you lived in before politics and the one you will probably put your presidential library in when you leave the White House. This place is one big, sloppy hog pen full of conservative Republicans with messy snouts deep in the earmark trough, led by the most hoggy of all choir directors, the editorial page of The Dallas Morning News, the city's only daily newspaper.
Talk about a culture of hypocrisy.
The very day the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi in Minneapolis, the Morning News published a pursed-lip Miss-Priss editorial that started out, "When it comes to Washington lawmakers policing themselves, even crackdowns have loopholes."
The editorial writers gave Congress backhanded praise because a recent reform bill seeks, in their words, to "stop hiding sponsorship of earmarked projects so budget-busting pork doesn't mysteriously drop into legislation." But then the writers added, "...we would have liked to see tougher measures against earmarking."
The Dallas Morning News editorial page comes out against earmarks? This is like a high-dollar hooker coming out for abstinence.
From its inception, the Trinity River project in Dallas has been almost entirely a creature of earmarks, and nobody has whored after those earmarks more sluttishly than the News. Every time a Congress member comes home with another earmark for the Trinity, the Morning News editorial writers leak saliva all over their page.
In October of 2006, the News endorsed Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson for re-election specifically because she had done such a great job bringing home earmark money for the Trinity River project. "From rallying Democratic support for repealing the Wright amendment to ensuring that Dallas received bridge money for the Trinity River project, her efforts have benefited North Texas," the News burbled.
Let's cut to the chase on this. Bridges like the one in Minnesota don't get fixed—maintenance is not done according to the rules, inspections aren't carried out, parts are not adequately tested—because the money for all of that gets sucked out of the system by the earmarks.
"Earmark" is really a broad term for all kinds of appropriations Congress makes to fund projects that ought to be illegal or at least un-doable under federal regulations. That happens to be a description that fits the entire Trinity River project to a T.
In October of 2000, Mitchell E. McDaniels Jr., director of the Bush White House Office of Management and Budget, sent a letter to Thomas White, secretary of the Army, telling him the OMB had found such serious errors in the Trinity River project that "The Administration believes that the Corps should not enter into a project cooperation agreement or begin any physical construction work on the authorized project until this and other concerns with this project are resolved."
McDaniels said the Army Corps of Engineers should cease work on the project because of three flaws: 1) a failure to look at a simpler, much cheaper fix that would have provided far superior flood protection to downtown Dallas; 2) a fiddling of the Corps' own rules and regulations for determining the economic benefits of the program; and 3) a failure to look at ways to solve downstream flooding, especially in the heavily polluted area of Cadillac Heights, by buying people out and moving them from harm's way instead of building an expensive new levee that will increase the threat of flooding to downtown Dallas.
None of those issues was ever addressed. U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose husband was the bond attorney for the Trinity project bond issue, dismissed the criticisms as bureaucratic whining and then led a vigorous campaign by the Texas delegation to get the project funded with earmarks and other side-deal, tack-on, slip-in appropriations. Now the backers of the project just lie about all of those issues.
But look: You can't do this kind of thing without lying to the public. One of the biggest, fattest lies told about the Trinity project has been the story that all of the major freeway bridges across the Trinity River downtown are slated for replacement anyway so the cost of replacing them now is not really attributable to the Trinity River project.
Got to do it anyway. Those old bridges just got to go. Nothing to do with the Trinity River project. That's the story. It's a lie.
Right after the recent bridge collapse in Minnesota, a Texas Department of Transportation list of "structurally deficient" bridges leaked—a very rare occurrence. The same day it leaked, state Senator John Carona, Republican of Dallas, chairman of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee, was all over the radio bitching because he couldn't get TxDOT to release the same list to him.
