Homeland Security Spending Bill: Democrats just want to spend all your money.

Republicans and Democrats are in a deadlock over the Homeland Security spending bill that is being debated in the house right now. I was watching C-Span earlier, and the Republicans announced that the Democrats had "capitulated" and "surrendered" to their demands that the earmarks be made transparent. They slighted the Democrats for running on a platform of transparency and then creating 'secret slush funds' for spending that wouldn't be revealed until the vote.

The Democrats, on the other hand, say that they have received in excess of 30,000 requests for earmarked spending. The Washington Post says this:

"To give himself [David R Obey] and committee staff members more time to screen them, he plans to drop the earmarks into the bills when they move to the House-Senate conference committees before the August break, giving members and the public a month to review and question them."

A month, eh? Does this sound like 'secret slush funds' to you? Does this sound like non-transparency to you? To me, it sounds like someone putting a wrench in the gears to prevent progress.

This kind of political discourse makes me ill. The Democrats are trying to make room in the budget for more border troops, education, health care, and more personnel; the Bush administration calls this spending "irresponsible and excessive" (Yahoo! News). The White House has promised to veto any budget that goes over Bush's spending cap; President Bush has never before vetoed a budget. Could this be because Congress is no longer cowed to his special interests? By the way, "irresponsible and excessive" spending could have been cut before the projected $4 trillion deficit.

With 30,000 requests for earmarked spending and a budget that will certainly be vetoed if it goes over Bush's request, wouldn't you want to review all of the options and narrow them down to be within the spending limit? Let's say you have $500 to spend on Christmas gifts and 50 people to buy for. At $10 a present, you might have to re-examine your list and determine who just gets a Christmas card--unless you want to surprise your husband, wife, or parents with a gift basket from the dollar store. Aww, a badly painted ceramic monkey and some paper clips--you shouldn't have, honey. Really.

Do the Democrats just want to spend all your money? No! That money is being put toward things that we need. We do have to realize as Americans, however, that we can either keep our money or we can have government funding for education, health care, social security, environmental agencies, food inspection and regulation, and the myriad of other things we have come to depend on our government to provide. It's not cheap to run a country. Add a tax cut to an expensive war, and we have ourselves a 4 trillion dollar deficit. Was anybody particularly unhappy paying taxes under Clinton? Or were we proud of our country, proud of our surplus, proud of the goodwill from other nations, and happy that we could all work toward a greater prosperity?

I was proud. I was happy. I was hopeful. And I think the rest of America was, too. Think back to the good times, and think about now. We do need to cut the 'irresponsible and excessive' spending in Washington; we can start by pressing our Republican leaders to work with Democrats for the good of Americans and stop wasting money on wars we can't win.