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By Root 360 0

budget was therefore complete and total bullshit, a “message” sent to the president by a Congress that actually held all the power already. It would be cast in the press as an antiwar gesture; in reality it was a laborious piece of buck passing, the new Democratic majority trying to cast off its political mandate by pretending the president still held the cards. After all, the only real consequence of sending a vetoed budget back to the president (with a message to take it or leave it) would be the inevitable political fallout that would come from being slammed by Republicans for “failing to support the troops in harm’s way” or whatever. The Democrats expected all of us to respect their boundless, ball-sucking dread of that kind of criticism, respect the fact that not more than five or ten of them have the decency to recognize that their political careers matter less than their duty to rescue young Americans and Iraqis from pointless deaths.

They also expected us not to notice that the supplemental had turned out to be a forum for reintroducing the old politics as usual. This time, the relevant clause was at the end of the bill. It read as follows:

EARMARKS

Pursuant to clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of Representatives, this conference report contains no congressional earmarks, limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined in clause 9(d), 9(e), or 9(f) of rule XXI.

I went back to see Wheeler in Washington. He’d promised to teach me how to read congressional bills so I could learn to spot the pork in them. And this one, he said through very hearty laughs, was as chock full of crap as any of them. So I grabbed the Congressional Record for April 24, 2007—Congress puts out a volume every day with a transcript of all floor dialogue that includes the texts of all relevant legislation—and sat down in his small office in downtown D.C.

The supplemental, he explained, was broken into two parts. The first part was simply the text of the bill, and in this case included about twenty italicized pages under the heading “Conference Report on HR 1591.” The text of the bill summarized the contents of the supplemental in almost-readable prose, including the much-publicized section outlining the “benchmarks” the al-Maliki government of Iraq would have to follow in order to continue receiving military aid.

Wheeler directed me to ignore that section for now, however, and flip forward to a section called the “Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of the Conference.” This was a much fatter section and had far less readable prose text; it was mostly numbers and tables.

“In any bill,” he said, “you always want to look at the joint explanatory statement first. That’s where you’ll find all the stuff. Here, for instance, look at this…”

He flipped forward to page H3946. It was a table that read:

EXPLANATION OF PROJECT LEVEL ADJUSTMENTS

(in thousands of dollars)

P-1

BUDGET REQUEST

HOUSE

SENATE

CONFERENCE

2 EA-18G Fund 1 EA-6B combat loss replacement

75,000

83,000

-367,000

75,000

75,000

0

4 F/A-18E/F (Fighter) Hornet (MYP) 3 F/A-18’s combat loss replacements

16,000

208,000

192,000

16,000

208,000

192,000

(cont’d)

“When you’re looking at earmarks,” Wheeler said, “you just read these tables. Look at the column for the administration’s request, then look at the last column, where it says ‘Conference.’ If the conference number is bigger than the administration number, you’ve usually got an earmark.

“Take a look at the number there for F/A-18’s. The administration only asked for sixteen million dollars, most likely replacement parts. But you look over at the House number, and that number is two hundred and eight million dollars. And voilà, at the end, the final number is two hundred and eight million dollars. So by this you can deduce that Murtha’s people in the House added three airplanes. That’s a House earmark.”

We flipped backward in the record.

“When you find an earmark,” he said, “you can usually go back in the text of the bill and find a little section that explains