The World Needs More Ninjas

Looks like the Senate would rather help a few dozen people in Alaska get a bridge than help rebuild a Katrina-damaged Interstate in New Orleans. The senior Republican in the chamber apparently threw a hissy fit on the floor when someone threatened to use his pork for something that actually might be useful:

The president pro tem of the Senate got his $230 million bridge, but only after he threatened to quit if he didn’t.

Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the chamber’s senior Republican, became furious when Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, offered an amendment yesterday that would have forbidden building the bridge and sent some of the money to rebuild the Interstate 10 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, which was damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

“If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state, to take money only from our state, I will resign from this body,” Mr. Stevens said. “If one senator can decide he’ll take all the money from one state to solve a problem of another, that is not a union. That is not equality.”

He was defending a bridge from Ketchikan, Alaska, with a population slightly less than 15,000, to Gravina Island, with a population counted in the dozens.

I guess he assumes that people would actually be upset if he quit. I’d actually be pretty happy to see anyone so addicted to unnecessary spending turn in their resignation papers.

The bill actually lost 82-15 as their is evidently bipartisan consensus that pork is good. Of course, very few Senators would support such a bill because it immediately opens the possibility that each of their individual efforts to bring pork to their home state would be up for review. The ones principled enough to vote in favor of the bill were (well, I’m sure the LA Senators would never vote against more money for their state, but still…):

Allard (R-CO)
Allen (R-VA)
Bayh (D-IN)
Burr (R-NC)
Coburn (R-OK)
Conrad (D-ND)
DeMint (R-SC)
DeWine (R-OH)
Feingold (D-WI)
Graham (R-SC)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Landrieu (D-LA)
Sessions (R-AL)
Sununu (R-NH)
Vitter (R-LA)

In the blogosphere, the bill had an odd combination of bipartisan support from Red State, Daily Kos, and Instapundit.

To be fair, I think irresponsible government spending is due more to our current system, which places strong incentives for elected officials to try to get the largest piece of the pie possible for their voters and thereby help ensure their reelection. The entire system needs to be modified. I’m still idealist enough to believe that people don’t start in Washington thinking, “Someday I want to act like a five-year-old for the whole world to see in order to defend something that everyone (save a few hundred Alaskans) knows would be much more beneficial to give to fellow Americans whose community has been destroyed.”