“Once unthinkable, Alaska will soon have a senator who will refuse pork projects,” said Andy Roth, vice president of the Club for Growth in Washington, D.C., quoted in The Hill newspaper about Miller’s primary win.
Miller has said, “This concept that we have of senators and representatives being elected to bring back the pork is the reason that we’re at the point we’re at.”
Miller signed a pledge by Citizens Against Government Waste saying that he will not request any earmarks if he is elected, the group said.
This pledge would basically limit Alaska funding to projects sought by the president.
“This will be the biggest change Alaska will ever see in terms of earmarking,” said Tom Schatz, president of CAGW, quoted by The National Journal.
CAGW said Alaska in 2009, for the 11th year in a row, had the highest per capita earmark total in the country.
But in 2010, without Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska dropped to fourth place on Schatz’s list. The delegation managed to only get about $100 more per capita for Alaskans than the national average, as compared to nearly $300 more per capita the previous year.
Under the Schatz definition of pork, Alaska took home $221 million in 2009 and $92 million in 2010, according to his website.
Schatz attacked Sen. Ted Stevens across the years as irresponsible and gave him the “Porker of the Month” award on more than one occasion. He criticized Stevens for projects ranging from the Anchorage airport to the supercomputer in Fairbanks.
Schatz said Alaska secured 1,452 pork-barrel projects worth $3.4 billion between 1995 and 2008. In 2008, Schatz gave Stevens the “Cold Hard Cash” Oinker Award for getting
$165.7 million in military pork-barrel projects.
For his part, Stevens always said that Schatz didn’t know what he was talking about.
“No one has ever been able to substantiate any claim that funds I have secured for Alaska are wasteful,” he said, “and these funds have come to us within the budget established by the Congress. These funds are not ‘excessive spending,’” Stevens once told an interviewer.
On another occasion he told an Anchorage audience that if he didn’t get earmarks for Alaska, the money would not be used to lower taxes. It would be spent in other states and “your needs would go unmet.”
If Miller is elected over Democrat Scott McAdams of Sitka, the Alaska congressional delegation would be divided about earmarks for the first time.
Sen. Mark Begich and Rep. Don Young have defended the practice as the only way of getting the needs of Alaska recognized.
“I listen and I provide. That's what I'm elected for,” Young told an interviewer three years ago. “You show me a congressman who says, ‘I’m not going to have any earmarks and I'm not going to listen and I'm not going to provide,’ and I'll show you a short-timer.”
Look for McAdams to make an issue about the level of federal spending in Alaska and the process of inserting local projects into the budget
“One-third of our state’s economy is based on federal spending. To say we’re going to do away with that, I don’t think is in the interest of Alaska. In fact, I think it would bankrupt our state,” McAdams told KTUU in Anchorage.
In addition to earmarks, Alaska also gets the most federal money per capita from the federal government, a statistic that Alaska politicians of both parties have always tried to downplay, arguing that because it’s a young state, Alaska has a lot of catching up to do with the Lower 48.
But budget hawks Outside don’t see it that way.
“It’s encouraging to me what happened in Alaska with Miller,” South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint told The Wall Street Journal. “It should be a wake-up call to Republicans that politicians who go to Washington to bring home the bacon aren’t wanted — even in a state like Alaska that has gotten so much pork under senators like Ted Stevens. Voters are saying ‘We’re not willing to bankrupt the country to benefit ourselves.’”
An editorial by the Scripps Howard News Service stated that if Miller gets to Washington, he should start trimming federal spending at home.
“Assuming he gets to Washington, we will have an early gauge of how serious he is about this issue — because if you’re going to attack federal spending, there’s no better place to start than his home state of Alaska,” wrote Dale McFeatters. “Forget cutting off funds to the United Nations. You can do that later. Let’s start off cutting the river of federal cash flowing to Alaska.”
“For all that talk of frugality and self-reliance, Alaska is happily awash in federal largesse,” he said.
•••
PHONE RETURN: I dropped my cell phone Wednesday morning on the ground at the Fox transfer site when I was dropping off garbage in a Dumpster.
I want to thank Luke Stenbak, a driver for Alaska Waste, who found it and returned it. I was careless. He was careful.
“This is about the eighth phone I’ve found this year,” he said. Stenbak said he has discovered some phones that remained outside all winter. Those he was unable to reunite with their owners, because he didn’t have the chargers, but most of the time when he sees one on the ground, he can track down the owner.
I’m really grateful that he took the time to pick it up, which prevented the phone from becoming entombed at the landfill.
Dermot Cole can be reached at cole@newsminer.com or
459-7530.
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