There are 12 U.S. House Republicans who control vast swaths of agency spending as chairmen of appropriations subcommittees. Known as “cardinals,” they are some of the most powerful members of the House.
For months behind closed doors, they wrangled with their Senate counterparts to come up with consensus dollar amounts and policy direction for the discretionary side of the federal government – then whisked a $1.1 trillion spending package through Congress last week.
Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah was the only cardinal to vote against the bill. In fact, Kingston was the only one of the 51 House Appropriations Committee members to shun the “omnibus” spending measure.
Kingston also is locked in a contentious Republican primary to join the U.S. Senate.
The vote demonstrates the contortions brought about by the Senate race, and the influence of right-wing pressure groups and tea party voters.
In Kingston’s two decades in Congress he’s become one of Georgia’s most effective advocates in the Capitol. Before they were banned, he steered earmarks, specific spending projects, to the coast and the rest of the state.
In the omnibus, the outlier appropriator fought for language to accelerate the groundbreaking for Georgia's biggest economic development project, the Port of Savannah deepening. With the Departments of Labor, and Health and Human Services under his purview, Kingston pushed funding for polio eradication – a big issue for the Atlanta Rotary Club.
Kingston said he met with Bill Gates twice on polio. Yes, that Bill Gates.
Kingston’s subcommittee also oversees the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control, which ended up with $30 million for a new advanced molecular detection initiative.
The bill was far from a pork extravaganza. Under the spending caps negotiated in the bipartisan December budget deal, it restored some – but not all – of the across-the-board “sequestration” spending cuts.
It got big support from Republicans, who can crow that non-defense discretionary spending will be lower than it was under George W. Bush. More than two-thirds of the GOP caucus backed the bill over the objections of the hardest-core conservatives and outside groups such as Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America, the sway of which has been questioned lately given the success of December's bipartisan budget deal and now the spending bill.
But when seeking out Georgia Republican primary voters in a wide-open race, one cannot afford to cede ground to deficit hawks on the right. And Kingston's history on the cash-distributing appropriations committee already has been painted as a political liability.
That’s one reason why Kingston joined Reps. Phil Gingrey of Marietta and Paul Broun of Athens in the “no” column Wednesday.
They were the only Georgians aside from Tifton Republican Austin Scott to oppose the bill. The aspiring trio also were the only Georgians to vote against the budget deal.
“It’s difficult when you fight for your individual provisions,” Kingston said. “But the spending level is still something I have a disagreement with.”
The bill sailed to becoming law within days of being made public, with plenty of victories for the state crammed in. Not that Kingston wanted to talk about them too much.
“Back in the day, that would be the first thing you do,” he said about publicizing Georgia priorities. “But these days anything like that just gets you in trouble.”
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