I’ve been a slow poster lately, mostly due to work raising its ugly head — it’s a damn shame I’m forced to make a living instead of being a Man of Leisure, but that’s the way it goes. Be that as it may, I caught the story of a classless move by Rep. Craig Fry with respect to the passage of the budget bill.
Apparently, he used the fact that House Republicans would not vote for the budget bill and the Democrats slim majority to essentially extort an additional $2 million for a school district in his area. If that’s not how the deal went down, I’d certainly welcome a correction.
A short-sighted view might call this shrewd politics or zealous advocacy on behalf of his district. But, ultimately, we all lose with this kind of free-riding negotiation. It’s kind of like the property owner who knows the highway is going through his yard, that all his neighbors have sold, and decides to extract excessive windfall profits from the public. That property owner’s negotiating position isn’t so good because of something valuable he has contributed, but only because he waited around long enough. So, he gets a windfall well beyond the value of what he’s giving, and the public loses. The next time a project is contemplated, it has more trouble going forward because even more people will want to be paid off as the hold out.
I don’t see any good that can come from Fry’s move. He looks bad. The Democrats who paid him off look bad. The Senate will almost certainly remove the $2 million from their version of the bill. If Fry’s gonna get his, the rest of the House Democrats might start asking why they shouldn’t hold out for theirs.
Like I said, my opinion here is based on the facts described above. If something different was going on, I’d sure like to know about it.
