By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

We who travel under the “conservative” label often are guilty of tossing around catch phrases and just expecting our listeners/readers to know what we're talking about.

“Pork barrel,” for instance. We'll say that a particular piece of legislation is “full of pork” or we'll just call it “pork barrel legislation.”

The phrase itself refers to the legislative practice of bringing home the bacon — getting stuff from the federal or state government for the folks back home so the folks back home will remember all that good stuff when election time rolls around.

Reelection campaigns are replete with references to the highways, post offices, parks, military bases, construction contracts — ad infinitum — that our representatives get for us so we will vote for them.

The tricky thing is that it doesn't count as pork if it's really something that is needed and that the government in question is constitutionally empowered to do.

More insidious is a lesser known application of pork barrel politics that involves one legislator putting something juicy for the folks in another legislator's district into a bill that has nothing to do with the juicy item in question. In this way, legislators can hide the pork in important-sounding bills.

For instance, congressman A might desperately need a few votes for his education reform bill, so he adds to the bill a couple million dollars for a new post office in congressman B's home town so congressman B will vote for his bill. For congressman C, he might include a couple million for the Congressman C Goes-Nowhere Highway.

You see how it works... and how it can so easily be abused.

The Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan organization that has been around for decades, spends much of its time counting the dollars that its members believe have been wasted in pork — money spent for no other reason than to buy votes.

I always enjoy CAGW's annual Pig Book, its listing of wasteful spending. You may or may not agree with the group's assessment, but I bet even the most apologetic reader of the information would agree that at least half of the items are legitimately labeled as pork.

This year's book lists $17.7 billion in pork, from 365 items identified by CAGW out of 4,326 funding earmarks.

Some examples singled out for special awards from the group included:

” Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., was given the Tracks of My Tears Award for securing $100,000 for Vidalia onion research.

” The Jurassic Pork Award went to Rep. Julian Dixon, D-Calif., for a $1 million dinosaur exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.

” Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, was singled out for the Money Does Grow on Trees Award for his $500,000 Olympic Tree Program.

You can find out more about CAGW and its research at www.cagw.org.

Meanwhile, the latest example of how the system can conspire against the need to eliminate waste is the bill Congress voted on last week to confer normal trade status on China.

The bill was pretty simple and straightforward, three pages stating that the U.S. and China would make nice and trade with each other even though we don't agree with each other's political systems.

Just hours before the vote was to be taken, however, 41 more pages were added to the document, loaded with goodies for the folks back home. It seems the president was having trouble getting some protectionist Democrats to vote his way, so he sweetened the deal for them.

Members of Congress weren't allowed to see the additions until the last minute. I tend to believe that if I were put in that position, the result would be an automatic “no” vote, no matter how much I might agree with the original proposal.

But then, you know the average voter would never understand my reasons for that vote. You know when I ran for reelection I would be faced with hard-to-refute allegations that I had opposed free trade.

It's the way things are done in Washington, but it doesn't have to be.

I will vote for any state or federal legislative candidate who promises to introduce and work faithfully to pass a constitutional amendment that prohibits the tacking of unrelated items onto legislation, be he or she Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or independent.

Before we can ever get the waste reduced from government spending, we've got to get it out from under the table.

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