With the appropriations process broken down and replaced by temporary crisis-mode funding showdowns, it is possible that only a fraction of the money promised will ever be spent. Actual spending must be approved by appropriations enacted separately by both houses of Congress. Plus, authorizing projects is but the first step toward actually funding them. “I’m not sure I would be betting a new era of cooperation simply on that vote,” he said. Water bills are “not inherently” partisan, said Patrick Griffin, a former White House aide and now associate director for the Center for Congressional and Presidential studies at American University. Bush vetoed a $23 billion version in 2007 as “fiscally irresponsible,” Congress overrode him, one of only six veto overrides in 25 years. So powerful are the forces behind water bills that when President George W. “The Peoria Lock and Dam is becoming a popular place for federal legislators to conduct news conferences,” the Pekin Times reported in Illinois over the weekend after the third visit from a member of Congress in a few months. Most vote yes, issue a press release and if possible, go down to the jetty or the dam for a photo op. Water bills are unique: Tea Party or not, a member of Congress cannot go home and tell the locals that he voted against a deeper port or a shored-up beach. “I am proud to say that this bill reflects the bipartisan action that my constituents expect from Congress.”īut Americans in search of a do-something Congress should not get their hopes up.įactbox: Projects from U.S. Even those who said they had concerns about the bill said they would support it because of its bipartisan sponsorship, “something all too rare in Washington these days,” said Elizabeth Esty, a Democrat of Connecticut. BIPARTISAN REDEMPTIONĪ dominant theme during the debate last week was redemption. “For all the hand wringing about the inability of Republicans and Democrats to get along in Washington, there is definitely one area in which they continue to get along and that is parochial projects,” said Tad DeHaven, a former Capitol Hill policy adviser and now a budget analyst at the Cato Institute. What is more, the Senate has already approved similar - though not identical - legislation and the White House, though skeptical, is not threatening a veto. In voting for the measure, small-government Tea Party faction members bucked conservative organizations, like the Heritage Foundation, that held sway over them during the October showdown that shutdown the government.Īnd liberal Democrats bucked environmentalists, who expressed concerns about provisions designed to speed up the environmental impact assessments that sometimes slow down water projects. Texas and Louisiana won approval for the dredging of the Sabine-Neches Waterway, 79 miles billed as America’s “energy gateway,” and “the artery of southeast Texas.”Īuthorizations went to North Carolina, California, the Mississippi Coast, Maryland, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and the entire Great Lakes region. The bill included projects that would benefit about half of the state delegations in Congress, by a rough count.įor Georgia, there was an expansion of Savannah Harbor for Florida, improvements to the ports of Jacksonville and Canaveral, not to mention the Everglades Restoration Plan. Whatever the jargon, the Water Resources Reform and Development Act was a reminder of the allure of traditional home-district spending and its healing power in an age of division. Nor, by members’ definition, were these earmarks, the pet projects inserted by individual members that have become taboo symbols of lavish Washington spending. Pork it was not, members insisted, rejecting the old pejorative term in favor of “infrastructure” spending, and garnishing the title with another word, “reform,” that’s also in vogue. No error there: 224 Republicans and 193 Democrats, at each others’ throats for the past five years, joined together in what Representative Virginia Foxx called a “love feast.” The bill got only modest attention in the aftermath of a government shutdown and the technological woes of President Obama’s health law when it passed last week by a vote of 417-3. President Barack Obama delivers remarks on infrastructure investment at PortMiami in Florida March 29, 2013.
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