Republicans need consistent policies

Published 9:26 pm Wednesday, October 16, 2013

What’s the old saying? “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the rider was lost…” The point, of course, is that little things can turn great battles.

The U.S. House of Representatives should remember this useful proverb, particularly in the midst of such a pitched battle as the federal budget.

But some members — perhaps most — don’t seem to get it. Last week, even as the speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader and the president wrangled over a shuttered government and a looming debt ceiling, Rep. Ted Poe, of Texas, an otherwise fiscally conservative congressman, made a plea for continued sugar subsidies.

“By allowing more foreign sugar into the United States, we create unnecessary and hurtful competition,” Poe said. He went on to warn against “becoming dependent on foreign countries for what we eat.”

Rotten fiscal fruit doesn’t get any lower-hanging that the sugar subsidies, an outdated portion of the Farm Bill that serves only a very narrow group of people in the United States, and hurts the rest of us.

“The U.S. government’s role in the U.S. sugar market is to make sugar unnecessarily expensive for American consumers,” explains David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner. “The policy costs them an unnecessary $3.5 billion per year, and has led food manufacturers to substitute high fructose corn syrup for real sugar in common foods such as soda (which is why Coke tastes better in Europe). American producers are essentially promised a floor price for their product well above what the market usually bears. By imposing strict import quotas and prohibitively high tariffs on cheaper foreign sugar imports, the federal government has, over the years, enriched a small number of large and lobbied-up sugar companies at the expense of consumers.”

Imagine if Rep. Poe made those comments about the auto industry: “Unnecessary and hurtful competition”?

As Freddoso points out, “Conservatives supposedly believe that markets work without government micromanagement.”

Sadly, this sort of ideological compromise makes much of the GOP fulminations about the Affordable Care Act ring hollow.

“In passing the farm bill, Republicans demonstrated that they are just fine with bloated welfare programs as long as those welfare payments go to well-healed special interests,” says the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner. “In the wake of this bill, Republican claims to stand for free markets or fiscal responsibility are risible.”

It sometimes seems that hypocrisy is the last remaining public sin. It fatally weakens the bold stands politicians take, no matter what the issue.

Freddoso says of that Farm Bill vote last week, “Even as conservatives were beating their chests in an obviously doomed, pretend effort to make Obamacare go away, 85 Republicans voted on Saturday morning to block any reforms to a far more socialistic scheme that could probably be abolished or at least scaled back tomorrow if they’d only stick together and vote their beliefs.”

The reality in Washington is that the GOP is facing tough odds in any budget battle. It shouldn’t undermine its own positions with votes that betray its principles.