Conscience Your Vote

Dear Children:

I was struck by something Mr. Bush said the other day. He was flogging his memoir. Matt Lauer asked him about his views on torture. Mr. Bush said he consulted lawyers on the question of whether waterboarding was legal. He was assured waterboarding is legal. Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were tortured. That was the end of it. Lauer dropped the subject.

The thing is, you know, something’s missing. The first step to such a decision is to determine what one believes. That must have been what happened. He decided what he wanted to do and then he consulted the lawyers. Surely he didn’t go to a lawyer to find out what he believed or what he wanted to do. Right? Who asks a lawyer about what one should believe?

As Pogo Possum said to Porky Pine, “We have met the enemy and he is us”.

We do ask lawyers to get our beliefs straight. We do ask scientists to inform our religious impulses.. We do learn how to act from television and the movies. Famous people are called celebrities. We do ask politicians to frame, if not proscribe, our ideals. Honestly, it is easier to have someone or an institution tell us what to believe and how to comport ourselves.

The alternative is a stony, narrow and uphill path.

Think of that as the challenge for the 112^th Congress. It has begun already as members have been asked to take the pledge on earmarks. Earmarks are what we used to call Private Bills. They are public projects for which only one member has any interest. Many of these projects are bundled together as a package with an agreement that all other members support one another. Neat.

That’s what Members of Congress are sent to do – get federal dollars flowing back to the home district. The pledge and the reality are irreconcilable.

There is a related practice on the revenue side. An industry or a single corporation cozies up to a Congressman and suggests that a tax break would sure be nice. That tax break is cooked up and packaged with other such tax breaks across the country and codified with the same sort of connivance employed with earmarks. No wonder our active tax code is nearly 72thousand pages long.

None of this is to say that all earmarks are pork and all tax loopholes are corrupt. One man’s pork is another’s essential service. One woman’s tax exemption is another’s quest for fairness. Earmarks initially funded national parks, laboratories, museums and lots of specialized university study. Governing is a tricky business.

We make a case here for the de-demonizing of the other guy. When you think about it earmarks and tax exemptions are a deeply democratic mechanism that embodies the sort of horse-trading we call bipartisanship. It is by no means perfect but it does have that effect. Just don’t get all worked up over the sanctimony that surrounds this debate.

Still, earmarks amount to about $15billion and, we guess, tax exemptions are on the same order of magnitude. In FY 2010 we spent about $138.6billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if you need further perspective.

My guess is that the lawyers will figure out a way to fund earmarks and generate tax loopholes some other way. Let's just hope the Congress acts out of an obvious set of beliefs as it proceeds.

I’m just sayin’

Poppy