The Smoke-Filled Room: Kosovo's Hidden Costs
Killian, Linda
E SMOK }OM by Linda Killian Kosovo's Hidden Costs T he war in the Balkans has been bad for a lot of people: the Serbs, the Kosovars, the Chinese diplomats killed in their Belgrade embassy, the...
...Perhaps, reflects the Michigan Republican, it was the leadership's failure to explain the additional spending...
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...That works out to about $36 million a day or, if you prefer, $1.5 million an hour...
...The fact is that most of the pork-barrel spending in this bill comes straight out of the Social Security Trust Fund...
...That pretty much summed it up...
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...It is refueled in the air...
...All of the B-2's are based at Whiteman Air Force Base in western Missouri, and whenever one flies a 3o-hour Balkan mission, it takes off from Whiteman and returns without touching ground abroad...
...Everybody goes along to get along...
...Money for sewers, money for dorms for House pages, money for fish in Alaska, money for reindeer...
...By far the most impressive firepower being deployed is the B-2 bomber, making its combat debut in this war...
...He voted yes when the bill left the House and he wrote about it in his weekly newsletter to constituents...
...It still has to be paid for...
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...Each lobbyist received a form headed "Emergency Defense Supplemental Coalition Progress Report" that he was supposed to fill in with information about which members he had called, written, or spoken to directly...
...Had they not added anything to the emergency request, the Republicans very well may have been able to defeat it...
...This is shaping up to be an extremely expensive little war and eventually Americans may actually feel it in their pocketbook...
...Box 549 Arlington, Virginia 22216-0549 If you have any questions call Kari Kowalski at: (703) 243-3733 EXT...
...lion for the first two months of Operation Allied Force...
...1.5 million to purchase water from the Central Arizona project for fish and wildlife...
...We said we were one thing and we are proving we are not," says John Shadegg...
...I couldn't suck it up one more time and vote for that bill...
...Hastert's move may have made a point, but it barely made a dent in the pork that was left in the measure...
...It also allows Peter DeFazio of Oregon say, "This makes the Democrats at their profligate worst look like Shylock...
...We have to draw a line in the sand...
...But something happened in that basement room and when the negotiators were finished the measure had ballooned to Si5 billion and the state of Alaska, Stevens's home state, had made out exceedingly well...
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...i million for spruce bark beetle control in Washington state...
...The bill went from bad to worse...
...The kamikaze three of the House GOP class of '94—Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, and Matt Salmon of Arizona—are all serving their last term in Congress because they have voluntarily term-limited themselves to six years...
...They were an eclectic group comprised of liberals who opposed the additional military spending and some, like Dennis Kucinich, who have opposed the war from the beginning...
...The Gulf War cost about $61 billion but Americans only had to foot the bill for $8 billion of it...
...And as for Kosovo, this doesn't end the matter...
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...Originally, Senator Ted Stevens, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the final bill would not exceed $n billion...
...Commission on International Religious Freedom...
...I had a lot of frustration and I switched my vote...
...S2.2 million for sewers for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Utah...
...In the House a total of 89 Democrats and 68 Republicans voted no on final passage...
...moderate Republicans who oppose the war and/or were offended by the pork barrel spending...
...such moderates as Max Cleland and James Jeffords...
...Others voted no because they oppose our involvement in Kosovo...
...The cherry on top of the sundae was the $666,000—$333,000 a piece—for the House majority whip and minority leader's offices...
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...I was willing to suck it up and vote for it...
...and Si° million for an exchange program with emerging Russian political leaders...
...In the Senate the vote was 64-36 with the same quirky mix of liberals including Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Robert Torricelli, and John Kerry...
...The B-2 payload is sixteen, 2,000-pound JDA_Ms (Joint Defense Attack Munitions) and each mission costs approximately $5,000 an hour or $150,000 total...
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...While NATO bombs, Congress does the looting...
...John McCain asked in Senate debate...
...Byrd has unabashedly invoked "That great philosopher Mae West who once said, `Too much of anything is simply wonderful.'" In a counter move to Byrd, New Mexico Republican Pete Domenici sought a S5oo-million loan program for oil and gas producers and said he would drop his request only if Byrd would also do so...
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...If all of that stuff was legitimate spending, they could have sat us down and explained it and maybe we would have voted for it...
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...Republican Greg Ganske of Iowa asked on the House floor...
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...Knowing they don't have to run again has emboldened them and, unlike most of their '94 classmates, they continue to fight unwaveringly for less spending and smaller government...
...Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, and other allies reimbursed us for the rest...
...Among the things included in the bill were $2 million to fund a feasibility study on manufacturing wood veneer products in Alaska, $3 million to help Alaskan reindeer ranchers protect their herds, $1 million for construction of the Pike's Peak Summit House, and $26 million for Dungennes crab fishermen in Alaska...
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...3o million for the Washington Metropolitan Airport Authority...
...4 million to renovate the House page dormitory...
...If we're still fighting, it's probable the administration will come asking for more...
...Van Hilleary, another member of the Class of '94, had planned to vote for the bill...
...As worthy as some of the programs might be, they should go through the normal budgeting process and not be slid under the door on an emergency bill...
...But for a chosen few—the military contractors and special interests who benefited from a bloated $15 billion emergency supplemental bill passed by Congress in late May to fund the war —the bombing of Yugoslavia has been like Christmas in July...
...E SMOK }OM by Linda Killian Kosovo's Hidden Costs T he war in the Balkans has been bad for a lot of people: the Serbs, the Kosovars, the Chinese diplomats killed in their Belgrade embassy, the NATO alliance, the American soldiers called upon to fight it, and especially the American taxpayers...
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...Every time a Tomahawk cruise missile explodes in the Balkan skies, at $1 million a pop, it means Raytheon has to manufacture another to take its place...
...But when it came back from the conference, Hoekstra says he just couldn't...
...When the measure came back to the House for final passage Hilleary did vote yes initially, but as he stood there on the floor of the House, thinking about what was really in the measure, "I just said this is too much, too much add-on from the Senate, things that don't need to be in there, and I switched my vote to no....I'm just sick and tired of doing things like the Congress did for 40 years...
...He called several GOP House members into his office and berated them for voting in favor of Byrd's loan program...
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...and hard-core fiscal conservatives such as Coburn, Sanford, and Salmon...
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...The $14.5-million aircraft was destroyed in the subsequent fire...
...A second Apache also crashed in a training mission out of Task Force Hawk, the Army operation based in Macedonia which is attached to the U.S...
...The Republicans knew Clinton had to have the money so the emergency request was veto-proof...
...Myrick contends many of her '94 classmates are afraid to speak out lest they be punished with loss of funding for a project important to their constituents...
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...In order to pay for all of this, Bill Clinton submitted a $6-billion emergency funding request to Congress which included $3.3 billion for Kosovo military operations, $700 million for munitions, $850 million for a readiness and munitions reserve fund, $720 million for refugee assistance, and $274 million to pay for the costs of last year's operation against Iraq and continued military presence in the Persian Gulf region...
...All three voted and spoke against the emergency spending bill...
...Is there somekind of reindeer emergency that I am not aware of that requires millions of dollars...
...Robert Byrd, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, pushed for a Si-billion credit program that would benefit a handful of distressed steel companies most especially Weirton Steel Co...
...Myrick and her band of '94 warriors say they will continue to oppose spending, "expose what they're doing," and fight to keep the appropriations bills within the spending caps...
...But doubling the amount Clinton had requested for a war they opposed made the Republicans look like political opportunists at best and hypocrites at worst...
...I don't see how we'll make it through this if we don't get our priorities back...voters could say why do they need us there if we're just like the Democrats...
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...This time around, each NATO nation is paying its own expenses, but the Pentagon and NATO have been coy about what percentage of the operation involves U.S.equipment and personnel...
...Myrick said she believes the spirit of '94 is gone, with less than 20 members of that class still willing to stand up and fight big spending...
...One of the worst things about this bill is the potential fall-out for the Republicans in the minds of voters, especially the conservative base so disappointed by their spending profligacy last fall...
...Once they start something there's no stopping until it gets to the bottom and this was the bottom," declares Sanford, who chided some '94 colleagues for "going native...
...Pentagon officials have stated that should ground troops be needed, either as a fighting force or for peacekeeping, additional funds would probably be sought from Congress...
...We were elected to bring some fiscal discipline to Congress...
...I just couldn't handle it...
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...involvement in the Balkan war and refused to endorse the air strikes when the House voted on a non-binding resolution in late April...
...As Democrat Russ Feingold, who voted no, said on the Senate floor, "This is a heck of a way to legislate...
...This is a betrayal of our responsibility to spend the taxpayers' dollars responsibly...
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...It's the Republicans doing what they've always blamed the Democrats for doing," charges House Democrat Sherrod Brown, in a sample of the kind of charges the GOP can expect...
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...Republican Bob Barr uses exactly the same language in labeling the Republicans' action "hypocritical...
...Ten of these $2-billion planes flew more than 5o missions in April and May...
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...What the GOP did gives Democrats like Dennis Kucinich a chance to call the emergency spending bill "an object lesson in the politics of gluttony...we're going back to a mode of spending to excess without regard to what we're spending it on...
...Add up the cost of all of the bombs that have been dropped in thousands of bombing runs, the deployment of 33,500 U.S...
...Once Tom DeLay got the money he wanted, the Republicans had to give an equal amount to the Democrats to buy them off, otherwise there would have been much finger pointing and jumping up and down on the floor on the part of self-righteous Democrats decrying the profligate ways of the majority whip, their favorite GOP bad boy...
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...We've got to take a stand or we're not going to stay in the majority...
...During the first two months of the operation, two American pilots were killed during a training mission when the Apache helicopter they were flying crashed in Albania...
...45 million for census programs...
...According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, by late May U.S...
...The current alleged surplus has just destroyed the fiscal discipline" that the Class of '94 and many other Republicans had a few years ago...
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...and such conservatives as Jesse Helms, Don Nickles, Rick Santorum, and Robert Smith voting no...
...The $15 billion is only expected to carry the administration through the end of the fiscal year on September 3o...
...Many Republicans opposed U.S...
...4 '...precisely the sort of thing we used to accuse the Democrats of when they were in charge.' Although the Senate originally decried the add-ons the House made to the bill, it didn't take long for senators to get into the spirit of things...
...taxpayers an estimated $2 bilLINDA KILLIAN, a Washington journalist, is author of The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution...
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...They agreed to change their votes and Hastert promised Byrd a vote on his steel loans later...
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...Now they feel they don't have to worry about it...
...But they felt a no vote on the funding request would look like they were not supporting our troops...
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...In other words, they could spend the money without getting caught at it by the accountants...
...The Senate also decided to roll the Kosovo funding together with other emergency measures to provide Si billion in disaster relief for victims of last year's Caribbean and Central American hurricanes, $600 million in aid to American farmers, and $900 million for victims of this year's tornadoes in Oklahoma and Kansas...
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...A number of Republicans and Democrats in both houses spoke out about the measure and voted against it because, like McCain, they oppose the pork...
...And if we're not, we'll almost certainly wind up paying most of the cost of resettling the Kosovars and reconstructing the country we've spent months destroying...
...Are we going to stand up for principle or are we going to do things for ambition...
...soldiers to the Balkans, 715 planes, and 19 ships, the fuel to keep them in the air and on the sea, and the cost of activating additional reserve troops, and it cost U.S...
...Like Hilleary, Republican Pete Hoekstra supported the measure when it left the House...
...Do these programs really sound like emergencies to you...
...Navy ships had launched some 35o Tomahawk cruise missiles...
...of West Virginia...
...One vote doesn't make or break a Congress," says Hoekstra...
...3o million for a Corporation for Public Broadcasting satellite...
...It was the worst example of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours and both our projects will pass and spending will go through the roof" Just a sampling of some of the other things contained in the bill include: $3 million for the U.S...
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...They vote for it even though they know it is wrong...
...I guarantee you, if he gets his, I'll get mine," declared Domenici of his Democratic nemesis...
...2 million for Holocaust Museum security...
...921,000 for Supreme Court Security...
...After watching the horse trading in a session of the conference committee thatwas televised on C-SPAN, House Speaker Dennis Hastert was disgusted...
...Si million for the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development...
...But that communication didn't take place...
...It's enough to give hypocrisy a bad name," charges David Obey, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee...
...It is spectacularly illogical to say we don't support the operation but let's spend twice as much money on it...
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...54 July 1999 The American Spectator Majority Whip Tom DeLay enlisted the help of defense industry lobbyists to help canvas for votes and of course the lobbyists came armed with additional projects for consideration...
...effort in the Balkans...
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...and $1.8 billion for a military pay and pension benefits increase that was already a part of Clinton's Department of Defense spending request for 2000...
...And for some it was a combination of both...
...The last straw for him was the additional funding for Delay and Richard Gephardt's offices...
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...The wheeling and dealing took place in a room in the basement of the Capitol...
...By adding the money to the emergency bill, the appropriators circumvented the normal budget process and freed up billions that could be spent on members' pet projects in the DOD appropriations bill later this year...
...But in fact, a significant reason for their eagerness to throw on what seemed like every item they could think of was that unlike the regular Department of Defense spending appropriation, the emergency bill was exempt from the balanced budget spending caps negotiated between the Republicans and Clinton in 1997...
...Without first passing a Senate version of the measure, senators decided to proceed directly to a conference with House negotiators...
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...It's even been bad for Bill Clinton, who would probably admit (if questioned privately and under the influence of a powerful truth serum) that the war hasn't exactly been the slam dunk he might have hoped for in reviving his presidency post-impeachment...
...But Shadegg says Americans care if money is taken from the Social Securi78 July 1999 • The American Spectator ty trust fund, and will judge Republicans on whether they are "prudently running the government or spending willy-nilly...
...This is precisely the sort of thing we used to accuse the Democrats of when they were in charge," says Barr...
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...Instead, Republican leaders decided to use the emergency spending request to beef up military spending and get some other things they wanted...
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...The culture is spend and if you know the bill is going to pass, shove everything you can on....There are so few of us that will fight it...
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...5.6 million for House of Representatives building repairs...
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...While the Europeans may have more troops on the ground, the majority of bombing runs are being handled by the Americans and we are also paying for 25 percent of the humanitarian assistance to the Kosovar refugees...
...S7oo,000 to purchase the United (Continued on page 78) The American Spectator • July 1999 55 Smoke-Filled Room/Killian (Continued from page 55) States Post Office and Federal Courthouse building in Fergus Falls, Minnesota...
...The emergency supplemental funding measure was crafted for the benefit of any member who had clout, each looking for his piece of the pork...
...It made me sick to my stomach," says Republican Sue Myrick, another member of the Class of '94...
...Instead, there was merciful silence although not from everyone...
...But one Republican House member says some colleagues, even though they oppose our involvement in the war in Kosovo, didn't want to give Clinton a graceful exit out of a failed military effort: "The Republicans don't want to bail him out by stopping the war so he can blame them and say he could have won it if the Republicans hadn't stopped it" by refusing to pay for it...
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...That message was loud and clear, asserts Bob Barr, but "apparently our party leaders were wearing earplugs and haven't taken them out yet...
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...You know we can forget about reducing the national debt if we keep spending down the Social Security surplus with this kind of uncontrolled emergency spending...
...Congress took Clinton's request and more than doubled it, loading it with the individual projects that are affectionately known as pork on Capitol Hill...
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...But our votes on spending over the next six months will define who we are...
...It became a pork fest," says Arizona Republican John Shadegg...
...They rationalized that Clinton had been underfunding the military for years and this was their opportunity to play catch-up...
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...Write to: Pentland Press, Dept.AS, 5122 Bur Oak Circle, Raleigh, NC, 27612 or call: 1-800-948-2786 The American Spectator • July 1999 79...
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...The House bill came in at Si3 billion with extra billions added for military construction projects, maintenance, and spare parts...
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...Designating spending as an emergency doesn't make it free...
Vol. 32 • July 1999 • No. 7
