I really don’t know how Congresswoman Sue Myrick’s press secretary keeps it all straight, but the guy deserves a pat on the back. Just looking at the three-dozen news articles spread across my desk is making me dizzy. They read something like this: Myrick fights pork barrel spending on Capitol Hill… Myrick announces millions in pork for her district … Myrick blasts others for pork… Myrick brings home even more pork for the district …
It’s one of the most bizarre political contortionist acts I’ve ever seen, and it’s getting stranger by the day. But one thing is clear. Myrick is determined to make a name for herself on the national stage as one of America’s great fiscal hawks — no matter how she votes or how much pork she brings back to the district. And hey, as long as the national media doesn’t catch on, it’s not a half-bad gig for her.
As the high-profile chairwoman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of fiscal conservatives in the House, Myrick has been increasingly shrill this year, blasting her colleagues and the President for out-of-control spending and record budget deficits. Let someone else pack a little pork into a spending bill and her poor schmuck press secretary will work himself into a lather at the fax machine, cranking out press releases about her irresponsible colleagues.
An April release from Myrick’s office railed about the pork-laden $275 billion transportation spending bill, which supporters said would create hundreds of construction jobs. “This bill is everything that’s wrong with Washington,” the release said.
Of course, Myrick didn’t call it pork last year when she brought home a $2.5 million giveaway to lure a defense contractor to Gaston County. In exchange, the company will create 200 jobs, and the money will help pay the cost of salaries. Gaston County is desperate for jobs, Myrick explained.
“It’s like a no-brainer,” she told the Charlotte Observer. That is, like, until someone else wants to dip into the federal pot.
“Congress has been spending money with little regard for our children and grandchildren,” Myrick wrote in a column she sent to the Charlotte Observer in March. “When spending starts increasing faster than inflation and begins to break records, we have more than a problem — we have a crisis.”
This “crisis” apparently didn’t worry her too much last fall when she voted for a labor, health and education bill that increased spending by 10 percent over 2003 — which, I believe, is more than twice the rate of inflation.
Just 12 days after the column ran, Myrick voted for the Fiscal 2005 Budget Resolution. The resolution projected that the budget deficit would be cut from $376.8 billion in 2005 to $234 billion by 2009. But there’s a catch. According to Congressional Quarterly Fact Sheet, the deficit numbers are an accounting sleight-of-hand in which Congress is using Social Security surpluses to offset spending. Without the Social Security money, the real 2005 deficit is actually a record-breaking $550.7 billion. Myrick, it’s worth mentioning, has always been of the opinion that someone should “fix” Social Security for those kids and grandkids of hers.
Of course, it’s worth noting that in the months before she voted for the mammoth budget above, she used her Republican Study Committee position to help lead a high-profile fight for a spending freeze, all the while lecturing the Bush Administration, which wanted to spend more than she did.
And that deficit spending she’s so upset about? Why, without Myrick, some of it wouldn’t have been possible. In 2002, Myrick voted for a $450 billion federal debt limit increase to keep the federal government from defaulting due to out-of-control Republican spending. It passed by one vote.
Then there was her vote last year for a federal spending resolution that would have increased the public debt ceiling by $839 billion, a federal record.
But then, this is the same Sue Myrick who vocally pushed her Republican colleagues for a phase-out of funding for the National Endowment of the Arts in the mid-1990s, then sent out a press release last fall announcing the $10,000 NEA grant she’d gotten for the Charlotte Philharmonic, “so they can give us a wonderful holiday concert.”
Now Myrick’s making the media rounds again, talking about her latest gimmick, a set of wallet cards listing the “six commandments” for limited-government conservatives. The Republican Study Committee is giving them out to help members of Congress remember the ideals they say they stand for. The cards weren’t her idea, she told WBT radio last week, but she sure didn’t seem to mind leading a press conference to announce their creation.
“If you look at these things on a daily basis and remind yourself of what we stand for, you might be more inclined to pull a different lever,” Myrick explained to WBT’s Keith Larson.
The $400 cost of printing the cards, it’s worth noting, was paid by federal taxpayers.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2004.
