Word: vetoes
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Once again, it's President Bush against just about everyone else. This time, he's vowing to veto the Water Resources Development Act, a wildly popular collection of 940 Army Corps of Engineers projects, including $3.5 billion for post-Katrina Louisiana and $2 billion for the Florida Everglades. The House passed it Wednesday night in a 381-40 squeaker, and the Senate vote should be similar; archliberal Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer of California and archconservative ranking Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma can't agree on the color of the sky, but they're both pledging...
...last President to threaten to veto a water bill was Ronald Reagan, and the result was the last meaningful reforms of the Corps. But the Corps is still responsible for reviewing its own projects, which is kind of like having Keanu Reeves responsible for reviewing his own movies. So the Corps is still approving and building economically indefensible and environmentally destructive projects - manhandling rivers for nonexistent barges, deepening ports for nonexistent ships, pouring sand onto beaches, and generally moving dirt and pouring concrete wherever its congressional patrons want...
...Bush Administration's veto message called the bill "unaffordable,? but there are deeper problems with the bill that reflect deeper problems with the Corps and its enablers in Congress. The Corps is funded almost entirely by "earmarks,? specific projects requested by specific Congressmen, so there's no way to prioritize between national emergencies (such as stronger levees to prevent a Katrina-style catastrophe in Sacramento) and preposterous pork (such as a notorious $459 million flood-control scheme for Dallas, a study of a $3 billion dam on the Susitna River that Representative Don Young wants in Alaska, or the seven...
...Democratic Senator Feingold was one of the President's only defenders on the Hill yesterday. On the other hand, Republican Senator David Vitter emerged from semi-seclusion to say he was "stunned? by Bush's veto threat, and accuse the President of abandoning Louisiana. It's true that the bill includes some projects to help restore Louisiana's vanishing coastal marshes and cypress swamps, which provide natural protection for New Orleans. (It's also true that Vitter had pushed to help timber firms to log those cypress swamps.) But as I explain in TIMR, the bill's main Louisiana project...
...might have inspired meaningful action had they come, say, four years ago. Now, though, they're little more than lofty talk. Even if Congress does pass a bill giving detainees the right to habeas, the legislation will probably amount to zip. The reason is not that President Bush will veto it - although he very well might - but that the detainees may soon get that right without congressional assistance. And how? Either the Supreme Court or the President himself will give it to them...