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Our Rep. Brown-Waite's New Capitol Hill Role Is Right On The Money

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By TOM JACKSON tjackson

@tampatrib.com

Published: January 9, 2009

It was appropriate, Florida's newest member of Congress' most powerful committee was saying the other day, that Nancy Pelosi ascended to the post of speaker of the House surrounded by children.

After all, observed the preternaturally incisive Ginny Brown-Waite, given the breathtaking fiscal plans Pelosi has endorsed in the interest of resuscitating America's staggering economy, "It's going to be our children who pay for it."

If not our children's children.

Because our descendants born and unborn are unlikely to think well of Washington's pending profligacy, Brown-Waite, the Brooksville Republican representing Florida's sprawling 5th District, means to take her seat on the House Ways and Means Committee paraphrasing the 20th century's foremost conservative lion.

It was William F. Buckley, author, publisher and movement-founder, who christened the National Review magazine thusly: "It stands athwart history, yelling, 'Stop!'

"

Given the genteel atmosphere in Congress' lower chamber, Brown-Waite is unlikely to yell. And, given the realities of the GOP's minority status in the committee room, where Democrats dominate, 26-15, GBW will be the voice on the record growling not so much "Stop!" as "Not so fast." And, "Not so much."

Here Come The Shovels

This will not be new territory. It is Brown-Waite, after all, who proudly bears the tire tracks deposited by the majority that raced to approve October's quaintly named "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008."

Hmmm. Oct. 2, the day before the bill passed, the benchmark Dow Jones industrials average closed at 10,482 and change. Thursday - yesterday - it closed at 8,742. At least we've had stability: Since the act took effect (a hair-raising dip just before Thanksgiving notwithstanding), the Dow has bobbed like a canoe gentling within the banks of Cypress Creek, no giddy highs, no alarming lows.

Nonetheless, still treading the let-'em-eat-derivatives high ground, GBW calls the bailout of the financial industry "a dismal failure."

Hoping, ostensibly, to get the American prosperity machine moving again, and with it the fortunes of both Wall Street and Main Street, Democrats on Capitol Hill and President-elect Barack Obama are charging ahead, waving the federal checkbook while ever mindful of congressman-turned-staff-chief Rahm Emanuel's admonition: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

Brown-Waite shudders ... sort of. "We can't spend our way out of this recession and into a steamrolling economy." But, she, too, is a creature of the public sector, rarely failing to grease her district with government pork. Observing all the activity on the other side of the aisle, GBW concedes that Florida in general and her Nature Coast confines in particular abound with "shovel-ready" public works projects waiting only for infusions of capital.

Taking The Arrows

If the spending creates jobs, she reasons, and those jobs create taxpayers and those taxpayers reinfuse the various public treasuries, perhaps it isn't money inadvisably spread.

Never mind that every government dollar spent is one less dollar in the hands of private citizens, funding private enterprise. But what was it Richard Nixon said? "We're all Keynesians now." Meaning: Government spending has become the tide that raises all boats. Never mind that government borrowing and taxing are the sump pumps that ultimately will drain the bay.

Given that inevitability, we prefer when Brown-Waite channels Milton Friedman: Whack taxes, she says, beginning with taxes on businesses. "The president-elect says he's open to that," GBW says, "but I want to see the details."

As a member of the committee that serves as the hub of Washington's financial wheel, her eyes will be among the first. "The economy can rebound," she says. "I hope it does. The indicators are there."

But there also is Speaker Pelosi, branding "bold" initiatives like a Madison Avenue pitchwoman, packaging a spanking-new trillion-dollar rollout as the essence of inspired courage.

Well. As if boldness in the face of overwhelming odds routinely represents the best course of action. Remember what boldness got Gen. George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn. Sometimes, "bold" is a euphemism for "foolhardy."

Here's rooting for a growl on behalf of restraint from the honorable Rep. Brown-Waite, and that it resonates in bipartisan fashion.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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