Pork Barrel Politics - 26 December 2003

"The moment the New Year comes in," a veteran Congressman remarked on the fateful eve, "There'll be a knock on the door and a constituent bringing greetings and saying - Where's the pork?"

He'll say it with a wink and or a dig in the ribs but he'll mean it just the same. I don't know when I first heard that sentence or something much like it.

The commonest version was of a United States Senator visiting his home town and shaking hands all around and telling each constituent the wonderful bills he'd helped to pass or where he stood on North Korea or the Middle East.

And the old geezer sitting on the courthouse steps says: "That's just fine, but what 'ya done for me lately?"

It's the same question which this weekend will be being asked all around the country, because it's the dawn of an election year.

It will be asked less of most senators, who are in there for six years and can take their time in fulfilling their election promises.

But the House is a new House of Representatives every two years - so the question is asked more insistently of Congressmen and women, all of whom face election or re-election in November: "Where is the pork?"

The second year, last year, of their term is the delivery year, the first year you might say is when they take the order.

The dictionary gives an accurate but prim definition of "pork barrel" - "appropriations secured by Congressmen for local projects."

That's about as enlightening as defining a dictatorship as a "system of government whereby one man is in control of the main branches".

You can get to the true juicy taste of the "pork" in the American political sense if you know the origin of the term. And there seems no doubt it derives from a benevolent practice common in the South in the years before the civil war.

Slave owners on special occasions, or whenever they were feeling particularly charitable (some did it regularly in the binding spirit of noblesse oblige - a code the best owners lived by), would put out salt pork in big barrels at a certain time on an announced day.

And like the Oklahoma settlers waiting for the firing of a gun to rush and seize a claim of land, the slaves would rush to the barrels and grab what they could.

It's a very fair, if rather melodramatised, image of the scene, in the House especially, at the very end of Congress - the second year of everybody's term.

The last bill the dying Congress passed in December was a so-called Omnibus bill, authorizing the spending of $23bn - more than the supplementary bill passed for the reconstruction of Iraq.

And what was more demanding, more urgent to more Congressmen than Iraq?

The answer is 7,000 other projects, local projects that some Congressmen had sworn to have funded - from $150,000 to improve the red and green stop signs in a small New York town to a $50m request by a Midwestern Senator to have an indoor rainforest built in his constituency as a tourist attraction.

In all 7,000 items, requests and allocations. You'll guess from the figure that these grabbings of pork for the locals are not allotted to states or counties but to single constituencies.

So, few requests are so humble as a piece of pork requested for your local constituency big or small that's been dying, or crying, for a new school swimming pool, a safe bridge for trucks between two villages, a million dollars for a marine museum in Alaska, a mere quarter million to have a Congressman's hometown's lake drained of tadpoles, (that's going to be trouble).

Notice that this $23bn bill was an authorization bill. It's what the House would like to have for total of these specified projects.

But the bill now has to go to the Senate for approval or rejection of, or indignation over, any particular item.

In the end it goes back to the House - but to it's appropriation committee who will decide, as it does with all money bills, who gets how much for what!

As you can imagine, in banging back and forth between different committees, there are only two people whose requests are certain to be granted - the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee - and the man sometimes called the most powerful man in the American government - the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

They are bowed down to because, obviously, they alone have a veto power in the direction of requests from lawmakers they don't like. They can refuse to take bills to the floor for a vote.

The Omnibus bill is over 1,800 pages long, and even under the refreshment of the New Year's punch, it's unlikely that all the Senate and all the committees will have read through and weighed the legitimacy of the 7,000 items.

So, many a lulu, lemon or what the 19th century called a "screamer" gets through. I'm sure nobody's going to deny the State of Maine a request in favour of more research on blueberries since it's a useful part of the State's economy.

But I remember how a famous southern Senator tossed into an Omnibus bill at the last moment - to pacify the State's education department - a new school bond issue.

The day after his election, he announced he was withdrawing the bond issue. Frantic supporters came to him. "But Earl," they cried, "You said it was a priority."

"So," he said sweetly, "Ah lied, didn't Ah?"

As the one institutional guarantee that your locality will be taken care of by the United Sates government, the pork barrel is unlikely ever to be abolished.

An old famous Speaker of the House called it: "every man's stake in his own government. "

It has been going since the civil war, and the first mention of the word in the slangy political sense is in the 1870s.

I don't think there's ever been a crusade to abolish the pork barrel and no politician of whatever stripe believes it would help.

As a young Congressman once said to me: "If you can't get some simple thing for the home folks, they won't trusts you, and maybe you won't take any interest in the big issues."

Or, as a long gone famous liberal Senator from Illinois, Paul Douglas, lamented: "As each group wins the battle for a special expenditure, they lose the important war for the general economy.

"They're like drunkards who shout for temperance in the intervals between cocktails."

So why is the second year of a Congressman's term so crucially important?

Because, as that young Congressman I followed through his first term put it: "It takes the first year to see how government works - you're staggered to find that there are seven separate stages before a bill is passed.

"When you've learned, you find that it's time to look for the loophole in which to slip through your piece of pork. At the end, I was desperate - too much wrangling over which piece for what. But at last, I won."

He was re-elected. He got through an appropriation to have a company deliver to his constituents for the first time - sliced bread.

One of the most triumphant examples of sneaking in a slice of pork by stealth was the case of an old-time dance band leader, who in his declining years, came to have a weekend television programme playing the songs of the 1920s, which were the big hits of his early audience.

Towards the end, you can imagine the tearful scene we saw on the tube: the old maestro gently waving his wand and his audience, the aged, nodding tearfully as he conducted " I'll be Loving you Always" - roused by the more rollicking numbers of the 20s, jigging their heads back and forth and lip reading "Yes, We Have No Bananas" and "Does the Spearmint Lose It's Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight?"

Years go by, the maestro dies.

One year, some weary Congressman discovered a $50,000 appropriation for a public statue of the maestro to be built in his hometown. It was an amendment to a national defence bill.

Too late. It had already been passed, and I suppose the maestro is still there, stonily waving his wand against the winds of the prairie.

A postscript to my Christmas letter. Many years ago I did talk about a school or college up the Hudson River which gave a two week course for Santa Clauses, instructing the entrants in such essentials as greeting the child, cleanliness, code of manners towards parents, problems of denial, etc.

This Christmas, in a California town, there appeared a Santa Claus who had been to no school but was being urged to start one of his own.

Finally, it has struck the town's typically Californian - that's to say ethnically mixed population - that a man who can say Merry Xmas in greeting lots of children is talking to people who don't know what he means.

Mr Michael Cox is on hand - a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, now a travel agent, and in between times a proficient linguist in 11 languages.

As Santa Claus, he uses mainly eight: Punjabi, Hindi, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin - English comes in there from time to time.

But he couldn't do his job without the language spoken by the majority of the population of hospital nurses (same as in New York).

The greeting he gives most often is in the Philippine language Tagalog. So last time, I forgot to say, Maligayang Pasko!

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