The article was originally published on Casper Star Tribune on April 16, 2021.
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the most tenured senator of all time, and long-standing chairman of the senate appropriations committee was nicknamed “The King of Pork.” He fought so hard for his state, and sprinkled so much federal money around West Virginia, that they came to call those grants and appropriations “Byrd Droppings”.
Whether you agreed with his tactics or not, he delivered for his state.
Today there is two trillion dollars of infrastructure money up for grabs, and instead of negotiating for some Byrd droppings, we gave the folks in power the bird.
We have 99 dams that are rated “high hazard,” and ten percent of our bridges are structurally deficient and will need repair or rebuilding. Unless we want to be the next Flint, Michigan, get ready for an estimated $500 million in infrastructure over the next twenty years to maintain a safe drinking water supply. But we’re on our way to getting very little of the two trillion in spending. Plus, I’m sure there are plenty of out of work miners and rail workers who wouldn’t mind the jobs required to rebuild all that broken infrastructure.
Add to this, the state is going broke.
Sen. Byrd served beside eleven presidents, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower and ending with Barack Obama. Some of those years his own party was in power, but plenty of years it was the other folks. He no doubt preferred to have his team the majority, but to Senator Byrd, whoever had the majority was always second to taking care of the folks of West Virginia. Being a senator, and delivering for his state, was more important than which party was in control.
No doubt President Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer would love some support from the Republican side of Congress. And it doesn’t take much imagination to believe that they’d happily trade a few billion dollars of Byrd Droppings for that support. But instead of elbowing our way to the front of the line, as I’m sure Sen. Byrd would have done, one member of our delegation called it an “out of control socialist spending bill,” while another hit the airwaves incorrectly saying that the bill is only six percent infrastructure — having amazingly excluding items such as dams, internet, pipelines, ports, and schools from the definition of infrastructure.
If our explicit goal was to get as little of the money as possible, I’m not sure how we could have gotten off to a better start.
Unlike the time of Regan or Clinton, Members of Congress today have only one goal: to be in power. It explains why not a single Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act, and not a single Democrat voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The job of being in Congress has ceased to be about enacting legislation or fighting for constituents — but about positioning themselves for the next election.
Of course, the infrastructure bill needs work, and likely there is a lot of stuff in there America does not need. But our state is on its ear financially, our infrastructure is in jeopardy, and we need to start taking care of ourselves before we take care of political parties. Wyomingites should make clear to our delegation that we want as much of those dollars, and in the next election they will be judged not by whether they killed the bill, but by how much they delivered for our state. There is roughly two trillion dollars being allocated across fifty states and one has to ask, if Byrd were our senator, how might he react.