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By Ernest Istook Posted in Congress — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Hollywood has once more rediscovered the Western movie. So has Washington. President Bush is cast as a lonely sheriff facing a gang of money-crazed desperadoes, as he tries to enforce fiscal law and order in the streets of the nation’s capital.

The sheriff knows this gang well; he's even ridden with them before. But now he's trying to honor his badge.

The first shootout will show whether any of the townspeople—even the Republican portion—will stand by their sheriff or not.

The shootout is at the WRDA Corral. That stands for Water Resources Development Act, and it’s like liquid bacon because it’s chock-full of local earmarks for flood control, environmental projects, lake and river recreation, inland navigation, and everything else that involves H2O. Bush doesn’t call it all bad, but says it’s just too much of everything. The Congressional Budget Office says it will cost taxpayers $23-billion, with $11.2-billion of that within the next five years.

The original bill’s price tag was “only” $15-billion. It drew White House disapproval but not a veto threat. But with another $8-billion added-on, badge-bearing Bush says the Congressional Gang has gone too far, so he’ll veto it.

Read on . . .

A lot of his best friends in Congress are abandoning him because they’re focused on what’s in it for them, regardless of the overall cost. One is Senator Jim Inhofe (R, OK), normally a solid ally of Bush; but he’s the top Republican on the committee that assembled this bill. He’s working with the Chairman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D, CA) to override a veto. Inhofe praises the bill and its list of dozens of projects for his home state (and mine) of Oklahoma, including help in complying with massive federal regulations on local water systems.

Bush says it expands the federal government’s role in unprecedented ways, and is shifting billions in costs away from those who benefit and onto federal taxpayers, such as by lowering the local matching funds requirements for maintaining harbors, channels and other economic development projects. The Upper Mississippi River System, for example, gets almost $4-billion in special help for five states (Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota). And there’s another $3-billion for Louisiana atop all the other Katrina relief.

The final bill sailed through the House by 381-40 and by 81-12 in the Senate. Still, that $23-billion price tag hadn’t been revealed when the House voted, so Bush hopes to change the minds of an extra 100 House members to uphold his veto.

In recent days, the House GOP leadership has announced a new and improved commitment to stopping pork-barrel spending. Whether they’ll prove it by upholding the WRDA veto is the first test of whether they’ll stand up to the other challenges ahead.

This fight will foretell the other spending showdowns we’re about to see in Washington. The outcome might resemble another Western: It may be good or bad, but right now it looks ugly.

--Ernest Istook, now a Distinguished Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, represented Oklahoma for 14 years in the United States Congress.