Finally flexing those veto muscles

Rob Portman’s resignation Tuesday as White House budget director served to draw attention to what he’s been able to accomplish in that post. In barely more than a year, Portman has:

• Crafted a spending plan to reduce the federal deficit faster than previously planned.
  
• Spearheaded passage of limited line-item veto legislation.
  
• Created the first federal database of earmarks, those heretofore unaccountable “pork” projects.
  
• Headed off attempts to circumvent new rules restricting the use of earmarks.
  
• Persuaded President Bush to finally use his veto power to rein in spending.

You almost wish Portman had been Bush’s budget director all along, especially when you hear how Bush is characterizing his push – actually more like a newfound conversion – on fiscal restraint. Last weekend, when he announced that he’s prepared to veto spending bills, he said “the American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies.”

Return? America returned to those days, at least the “spend” portion, several years ago – thanks largely to Bush’s refusal to impose any real fiscal restraint on Congress while it was in GOP hands. During the Bush years, spending bill after spending bill ballooned the federal bloat without being punctured by Bush’s veto pen. In 2004, three years into his presidency, total federal spending had gone up 23.7 percent – including 31.5 percent growth in discretionary spending. Much of that was related to 9/11 and to the Iraq conflict, but much wasn’t – like the huge Medicaid prescription drug expansion whose lowball estimate of $400 billion will take its place among the pantheon of budgetary howlers. Bush went 5½ years without using his veto power – and the first veto was on a stem-cell research bill.

Now, he’s taking aim on the $37 billion Homeland Security bill, which exceeds his request by $2.1 billion. Compared even to the $17 billion in extraneous spending attached to the Iraq reauthorization bill Bush signed last month, that’s chicken feed. Besides, if there’s anywhere extra spending might be justified, it’s Homeland Security, unless the items are unrelated pork projects – which they don’t appear to be (an additional $600 million for AIDS in Africa, for example).

So why the fiscal prudence now? As Portman explained in his phone call Tuesday announcing his resignation, Republicans got whacked in the 2006 election – and particularly in Ohio – largely because voters believed the GOP had “lost our way on taxes and spending.” Bush has to burnish that fiscal image, and fast, if Republicans are to have any chance of holding onto the White House and/or weakening the Democrats’ hold on Congress. Evidently, Portman has convinced Bush that there’s nothing like a few line-in-the-sand vetoes to accomplish that.