Testing the public's patience

We can’t believe they did it again. Damn the torpedoes, damn the elections, damn the people, the U.S. Senate is forging ahead with a $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill that is festooned with more than 6,000 earmarks, including one that amounts to the most significant legislation specifically affecting Montana in years.

Incredibly, Montana Sen. Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act is attached to the huge bill aimed at funding about a dozen federal government budgets. Now renamed the Forest Jobs and Restoration Act, this is the Tester bill that would, among other things, mandate logging on about 70,000 acres on two national forest and designate a whopping 666,260 acres of federal lands as wilderness.

This is a bill that deserved the Full Monty, a complete and thorough congressional review with transparency and plenty of public input. Instead, it didn’t even make it out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, it was never debated on the Senate floor and it has never been considered on its own by the House.

Now it has become a shameful and very demonstrative example of everything that’s wrong with earmark bonanzas in Washington, D.C. If Tester’s bill made it into the omnibus spending bill, then what other bills worthy of stand-alone consideration have been attached? And what junk earmarks have been attached?

This spells out the fundamental problem with earmarks and riders in Congress. Although they amount to just a small fraction of the total spending being considered, they encourage slothful and irresponsible behavior by lawmakers.

Waiting until the end of the year to pass a bill only days after its been introduced is intentional — lawmakers will vote for it not knowing anything about most of its contents, only because it contains their own pork-barrel provisions.

But it has become so obnoxious that it no longer goes unnoticed. The public is furious about “the way things work” in Washington.

Tester’s staff has been defending his legislation and its presence in the spending bill by pointing  to 11 public listening sessions that were held in Montana last year, talking about its availability online, and noting that it had a committee hearing last December. Tester’s crew also points to a variety of groups that lean politically left and right that support the bill.

Sorry, but that’s not enough. There are plenty of groups and people, on both the left and right, that have raised serious concerns about the bill from many angles, and they have been denied due process in Congress.

They may have expected changes in committee, a vigorous debate on the Senate floor, and maybe further modifications in the House before final consideration, and they’re not getting any of it.

There is no hurry in passing a bill that is touted as a job creator, primarily because lumber markets are in the tank and the Forest Service is not in a good position to promise immediate logging projects, even if the bill calls them mandatory. Also, there are no guarantees that these projects won’t be litigated by environmental groups in any case.

This bill deserves to be considered on its own, and Congress needs to toss out the omnibus spending bill with all its earmark ornaments and simply pass a “continuing resolution” that will temporarily fund government agencies at current levels. That would be a Christmas present for the public.