Rangel and Feinstein: King and Queen of Pork

When the Democrats asked the American people in November of 2006 to put them in charge of Congress, they made many promises to close the deal. Two of those promises were ethics reform and a major curb on earmarks.

The ethics reform promise has turned out to be a joke. This is one of the most corrupt and ethically challenged Congressional terms ever seen in modern history. We have documented examples of the corruption many times on The Liberty Sphere.

This Congress is also poised to be the most reckless purveyor of pork in recent memory as well.

Pork barrel spending is the practice of politicians of inserting into legislation spending amendments that benefit their home territory--'earmarks,' as they are commonly called today.

The promise of the Democrats to do something about earmarks is also quickly becoming a big joke in Washington. Recently U.S. Senator Jim Coburn, R-Oklahoma, castigated the Senate for putting earmarks ahead of bridge safety, even as the nation reels from a major tragedy regarding an unsafe bridge in Minnesota.

What did the Democrats decide to do instead?

Two examples, one from the Senate, and the other from House, perfectly depict the attitude of this Congress toward pork-barrel spending.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who has yet to face one single hearing into the scandal revolving around her awarding lucrative government contracts to her husband's businesses, requested a $4 billion dollar earmark in order to build a park in--and get ready for sudden onset nausea--Beverly Hills.

You read that right. Beverly Hills, California.

Even the dimmest watt in the socket knows that Beverly Hills is absolutely the last place in America that needs a park funded by taxpayers to the tune of 4 billion dollars. Without doubt, the top ten earners in the Beverly Hills zip code could build the park out of their own pockets and never miss it.

Moving on to the U.S. House of Representatives we have Charles Rangel, that jovial ole chap whose intellect never quite climbed up to equal his personality. A pleasant fellow, no doubt, Rangel nonetheless has always been afflicted with the disease that epitomizes the woes of the Democratic Party leadership. He has never met a tax he didn't like, and he believes that taxpayers exist to fund government programs so that government can help taxpayers.

The circular logic of such a thing aside, Rangel wants to build a monument to himself in New York City. The U.S. Representative from New York wishes that the taxpayers of America--you and I--pay the sum of $2 million to refurbish an old building for a library on the campus of City College of New York in Harlem.

And that's not all. Rangel wants the building named after himself.

Maybe I am drawing a complete blank at this point, but I thought this sort of thing is what they do for politicians who are dead. Or at least to honor those who retire from Congress after years of service.

But who's really concerned about such things? When you are the King and Queen of pork barrel spending like Rangel and Feinstein, I suppose you can get whatever you want at taxpayer expense, whenever and wherever you want it.

As the late Republican Senator and conservative icon Everette Dirksen quipped about the spending of Congressional Democrats during the 1960s, 'A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.'

It turns out that Dirksen's observations are just as relevant today as they were then.