We who

travel under the "conservative" label often are

guilty of tossing around catch phrases and just expecting

our listeners/readers to know what we're talking about.

"Pork

barrel," for instance. We'll say that a particular

piece of legislation is "full of pork" or we'll

just call it "pork barrel legislation."

The phrase

itself refers to the legislative practice of bringing

home the bacon - getting stuff from the federal or

state government for the folks back home so the folks

back home will remember all that good stuff when election

time rolls around.

Reelection

campaigns are replete with references to the highways,

post offices, parks, military bases, construction

contracts - ad infinitum - that our

representatives get for us so we will vote for them.

The tricky

thing is that it doesn't count as pork if it's really

something that is needed and that the government in

question is constitutionally empowered to do.

More

insidious is a lesser known application of pork barrel

politics that involves one legislator putting something

juicy for the folks in another legislator's district into

a bill that has nothing to do with the juicy item in

question. In this way, legislators can hide the pork in

important-sounding bills.

For

instance, congressman A might desperately need a few

votes for his education reform bill, so he adds to the

bill a couple million dollars for a new post office in

congressman B's home town so congressman B will vote for

his bill. For congressman C, he might include a couple

million for the Congressman C Goes-Nowhere Highway.

You see how

it works... and how it can so easily be abused.

The

Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan

organization that has been around for decades, spends

much of its time counting the dollars that its members

believe have been wasted in pork - money spent for

no other reason than to buy votes.

I always

enjoy CAGW's annual Pig Book, its listing of wasteful

spending. You may or may not agree with the group's

assessment, but I bet even the most apologetic reader of

the information would agree that at least half of the

items are legitimately labeled as pork.

This year's

book lists $17.7 billion in pork, from 365 items

identified by CAGW out of 4,326 funding earmarks.

Some

examples singled out for special awards from the group

included:

� Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., was given

the Tracks of My Tears Award for securing $100,000 for

Vidalia onion research.

� The Jurassic Pork Award went to Rep.

Julian Dixon, D-Calif., for a $1 million dinosaur exhibit

at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.

� Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, was

singled out for the Money Does Grow on Trees Award for

his $500,000 Olympic Tree Program.

You can

find out more about CAGW and its research at www.cagw.org .

Meanwhile,

the latest example of how the system can conspire against

the need to eliminate waste is the bill Congress voted on

last week to confer normal trade status on China.

The bill

was pretty simple and straightforward, three pages

stating that the U.S. and China would make nice and trade

with each other even though we don't agree with each

other's political systems.

Just hours

before the vote was to be taken, however, 41 more pages

were added to the document, loaded with goodies for the

folks back home. It seems the president was having

trouble getting some protectionist Democrats to vote his

way, so he sweetened the deal for them.

Members of

Congress weren't allowed to see the additions until the

last minute. I tend to believe that if I were put in that

position, the result would be an automatic "no"

vote, no matter how much I might agree with the original

proposal.

But then,

you know the average voter would never understand my

reasons for that vote. You know when I ran for reelection

I would be faced with hard-to-refute allegations that I

had opposed free trade.

It's the

way things are done in Washington, but it doesn't have to

be.

I will vote

for any state or federal legislative candidate who

promises to introduce and work faithfully to pass a

constitutional amendment that prohibits the tacking of

unrelated items onto legislation, be he or she Democrat

or Republican, Libertarian or independent.

Before we

can ever get the waste reduced from government spending,

we've got to get it out from under the table.