A Hard-Edged Cheesehead and the Power of the Purse
More important than earmarks, he says, are the overall spending and budget priorities Congress tackles each year in 12 appropriations bills. "Earmarking is a tiny little aspect of what happens," he says. He's focused on boosting funds for Pell grants for college students, veterans' healthcare, the National Institutes of Health, and other domestic programs. The appropriations bills will most likely total about $20 billion more than the president's budget, an increase George Bush says he won't tolerate. The president has threatened to veto most of the bills. That fight is several weeks away, but Obey says Bush is just "engaging in a giant diversion," trying to pin the nation's debt problems on "this little difference we have in discretionary spending."
Yes, antiwar activists and Obey have clashed this year (an infamous YouTube video this spring showed Obey referring to some of them as "idiot liberals"). Like them, Obey wants out of Iraq immediately—"Who doesn't?" he asks, saying that he voted against the war authorization bill in 2002. But having served in Congress during the Vietnam War, he knows how hard it is to win the votes necessary for restrictions and timetables on withdrawing U.S. troops. "People say, 'Why should you compromise? Stand on principle even if you lose,'" Obey says. "Any idiot can pound his chest and rage at the moon three times, but it doesn't have much effect." That Democrats were able to put legislation on Bush's desk this spring with a timetable for withdrawal was "an absolute miracle" to him, despite the president's veto in the end. Democrats are planning to keep the pressure on—through similar legislation this month and the upcoming defense appropriations bill—"until enough Republicans go down to the White House and say, 'Mr. President, this is over,'" Obey says. That may be many months away. But David Obey is working the process. That's something he knows how to do.
advertisement
