Not the reason you want to end up in The Wall Street Journal
I live here in Greensboro, but various relatives have vacation places and/or live up in the mountains, so I'm passingly familiar with Asheville-area politics. One of the enduring monuments of those politics is 11th District Rep. Charles Taylor, who ended up in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription-only) for all the wrong reasons, most having to do with self-dealing through pork earmarks. TPMMuckraker summarizes:
Rep. Charles Taylor (R-N.C.) has a remarkable talent for steering federal dollars to benefit properties that he owns, The Wall Street Journal reports this morning.As you read about the millions that Taylor has earmarked for himself ($11.4 million to widen a highway that runs through a resort town where his development companies own thousands of acres, $3.8 million for a park that is "directly in front of the Blue Ridge Savings Bank, flagship of his financial empire"), recall Taylor's dogged opposition to federal money going to a 9/11 memorial. As chairman of the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee, Taylor was for years the sole impediment to releasing the $10 million in federal funds needed to buy the land for a memorial in Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed.
Taylor's opposition to the effort, The Washington Post explained at the time, "comes down to principle: The federal government is already the largest landowner in the country, and he believes that no additional tax dollars should go to more land buying for this or any other memorial."
When challenged on his earmarks by the Journal, Taylor sounds a different principle:
"The same tax dollars would be spent," [Taylor] said through a spokesman. "The decisions about where and how much would just be left to unelected bureaucrats."
Pork is a bipartisan, and very expensive, problem. (For more info on pork, I cannot recommend highly enough "Adventures in Porkland: How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Won't Stop," by Brian Kelly, which although its examples are now somewhat dated, remains an excellent, enraging, amusing primer on the subject.) But getting pork for your district is one thing. Getting pork to enrich your very own interests, however, is something else entirely and about the unloveliest behavior a congresscritter can engage in without the involvement of another person.