SHOPPING AT THE WASHINGTON MALL

Here’s a question: Would you go shopping for shoes at a grocery store?

Why not? Oh, yes, grocery stores don’t sell shoes. You only go to a particular store because it’s selling what you want to buy. You don’t go to a store that doesn’t sell what you want to buy. Right, boys and girls?

This Kindergarten lesson came to mind when I saw the Democrats over at the Library of Congress yesterday (January 18) ostentatiously signing what they called their “Declaration of Honest Leadership and Open Government.”

I thought about putting their Declaration in the TTP Humor File, because when I read it I laughed my head off. It lists eight “reforms,” with each named after an individual or company involved in a Republican scandal – like the “Jack Abramoff reform,” the “Grover Norquist reform,” or the “Halliburton reform.”

How cute. Yet when you examine the content of the reforms, you discover that every one of them is designed to make it seem more difficult for “lobbyists” to buy what’s for sale at the Washington Mall. Not one of them is designed to restrict what is for sale.

“The Mall” in DC is not a shopping center. It’s the long public park along which are the Smithsonian Museums, in the center of which is the Washington Monument, at which one end is the Lincoln Memorial – and at the other end is the Capitol Building, wherein work 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen selling stuff to lobbyists.

The problem, which the Democrats only want to politicize and have not the slightest desire to solve, is what’s for sale – the power of Congress to dispense vast amounts of money or pass laws that can either subsidize or destroy businesses and entire industries.

The solution is to reduce that power. This the Democrats will never do. Ask them about it, and they will angrily switch the subject to “lobbying reform.” It is a perfect example of what “reform” means in Washington:

A phony attempt to fix a governmental flaw which does nothing to actually eliminate the flaw, and will result in new flaws piled on the old one.

Let’s take the current blather about “earmarks.” There are thousands of them now in the federal budget, inserted by Congresscritters to fund specific projects in their districts or states – the most famous being Ted Stevens’ “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska.

They have exploded in number because Congress discovered they were a way to circumvent the federal bureaucracy.

An earmark to fund, say, a desalination plant in Long Beach, California, bypasses the EPA. Without it, Congress could provide money for it in the EPA’s budget allocation, but it would be at the discretion of EPA bureaucrats to fund the plant or something somewhere else.

A real reform would be for Congress to reduce the budget and regulatory authority of unelected bureaucracies. A fundamental reform would be to challenge the constitutionality of the very existence of such bureaucracies. There is no enumerated power whatever in the Constitution that authorizes the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency, a Department of Education, or Federal Drug Administration.

All of these bureaucracies and so many others are in fact unconstitutional. But far from discussing this, or even reducing their power and funding, politicos like Little Johnny McCain and Nancy Pelosi are running around denouncing “ the earmark process.”

Of course, all restricting Congressional earmarks would result in would be lobbyists shifting their wining and dining from politicians to bureaucrats.

Maybe if a hard core conservative like Arizona’s John Shadegg wins enough Republican votes to be House Majority Leader, there will at least be a public discussion of what real reform in Washington would take: Reducing the power of government, not lobbyists.

So let’s see how the House Leadership vote goes on February 2. If Shadegg comes out on top of Missouri’s Roy Blunt (who has scandal-tainted “baggage” I’m told) and Ohio’s John Boehner (a cautious moderate), the Republicans may turn their crisis into an opportunity to create real reform.

That’s the last thing the Democrats want. If it turns out it’s also the last thing the Republicans want, this will be the last year they’ll run Congress for a long time to come.