Spenders Become Savers in Race for Key House Post
By CARL HULSE
NYT
WASHINGTON — The thick binder is dominated by a drawing of a chubby Uncle Sam, shirt buttons straining against his girth, with a fleshy hand open and outstretched.
“Uncle Needs a Diet,” declares the package assembled by Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, one of three candidates in the race for one of the most powerful, and now paradoxical, jobs in government: leading the House Appropriations Committee in the new Congress as the Republican leadership tries to transform the panel from a fountain of federal spending into ground zero for budget cutting.
Selecting a chairman — a party vote is expected Tuesday — is the first step in perhaps the most audacious aspect of the plan by Representative John A. Boehner, the incoming Republican speaker, to alter the way the House works. Like Mr. Lewis, the other two leading candidates, Representatives Harold Rogers of Kentucky and Jack Kingston of Georgia, are campaigning to convince their party’s leadership that they can cast aside their own histories as earmarkers and pork-allocators and lead a shift in focus from how to spend it to how to save it.
To make the effort more than a slogan will mean upending one of the most entrenched cultures in Washington, a bipartisan tradition of directing money to favored causes with an eye as much to political gain as to policy outcome. Under both parties, the committee has long been a power unto itself, a secretive realm where subcommittee chairmen hold sway over cabinet secretaries and generals and financing can almost magically materialize or disappear for little-scrutinized local projects even as national priorities are set or dismissed.
(More here.)
NYT
WASHINGTON — The thick binder is dominated by a drawing of a chubby Uncle Sam, shirt buttons straining against his girth, with a fleshy hand open and outstretched.
“Uncle Needs a Diet,” declares the package assembled by Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, one of three candidates in the race for one of the most powerful, and now paradoxical, jobs in government: leading the House Appropriations Committee in the new Congress as the Republican leadership tries to transform the panel from a fountain of federal spending into ground zero for budget cutting.
Selecting a chairman — a party vote is expected Tuesday — is the first step in perhaps the most audacious aspect of the plan by Representative John A. Boehner, the incoming Republican speaker, to alter the way the House works. Like Mr. Lewis, the other two leading candidates, Representatives Harold Rogers of Kentucky and Jack Kingston of Georgia, are campaigning to convince their party’s leadership that they can cast aside their own histories as earmarkers and pork-allocators and lead a shift in focus from how to spend it to how to save it.
To make the effort more than a slogan will mean upending one of the most entrenched cultures in Washington, a bipartisan tradition of directing money to favored causes with an eye as much to political gain as to policy outcome. Under both parties, the committee has long been a power unto itself, a secretive realm where subcommittee chairmen hold sway over cabinet secretaries and generals and financing can almost magically materialize or disappear for little-scrutinized local projects even as national priorities are set or dismissed.
(More here.)
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