Mississippi bacon

In these times of balanced budgets, spending caps and military cutbacks, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott continues to defy gravity. While others tighten their belts, the defense industry in Sen. Lott’s Mississippi bellies up to the trough.

Actually, bullies up to the trough would be the more apt description. The only thing more shocking than the $8 billion worth of defense bacon Sen. Lott brought home in the fiscal 2000 defense appropriations bill was the way he got it. Pro wrestling is less rigged.

If this were just a case of helping the home state beat out other states for defense goodies, one could say “it’s good to be senate majority leader.” By forcing the Pentagon to accept projects it does not want, Sen. Lott has gone beyond clout to bludgeoning.

The Air Force had planned to equip a hurricane-chasing reserve unit in Biloxi with 10 new aircraft in 2006; the existing C-130s still had that much useful life left in them. Since the new planes are partially assembled in Mississippi, Sen. Lott thought otherwise. Anyone looking for a clean, low-mileage C-130 should contact the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron.

The Navy did not want to start construction on a $1.5-billion mini-aircraft carrier until 2005. Sen. Lott’s beloved Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula has the contract and didn’t want to wait that long, so it won’t.

Let other states worry about what to do with closed military bases. A mothballed ammunition plant in Mississippi will become either the center for a space-based laser project or a Navy human resources center. Maybe both. Throw in some new and unneeded ship-berthing facilities, classrooms, barracks, flight simulators, hangars, software-development labs and tank firing ranges, and we’re talking real leadership qualities.

This looting and pillaging has been under way since Sen. Lott rose to leadership nearly five years ago. It would be somewhat palatable if there was evidence it actually helped his impoverished state, yet Mississippi remains at the bottom of nearly every economic, educational and social measure – a new report lists it 44th in access to health care, for example. Someone is benefiting from Sen. Lott’s staunch advocacy; it just doesn’t seem to be the average Mississippian.

Maine knows full well how, so to speak, persuasive Sen. Lott can be. When Bath Iron Works, in partnership with Louisiana’s Avondale, beat out Ingalls on a Navy contract for a new assault vessel, the senator was so distraught he threatened to scrap a deal that would had BIW and Ingalls each build six new destroyers. He could only be consoled when the Pentagon decided maybe it could use a couple of extra destroyers and maybe they ought to be Mississippi made.

Sen. Lott, of course, did not invent arm-twisting and abuse of power, but when combined with his constant sermonizing about the importance of character and honesty in government, he has taken it to a new height of hypocrisy. A recent column, the type senators often produce for the newspapers back home, is littered with such phrases such as “rise above political sparring and seek what is best or the American people” and “basic values are skewed because the current administration seems to have no guiding principles.” He worries lest some recent White House action “is a planned and measured ploy to gain maximum political favor.” He frets about the “line between politics and policy.”

The extent to which congressional leaders, of both parties, have use – misused – their positions has been apparent to the public to years, yet the need to reform Congress and to reign in the inordinate power of leadership never gets past the grumbling stage. By his own excesses, Sen. Lott may have performed the valuable service of making it too preposterous to ignore.