As many Virginia conservatives know, one of our most urgent objectives today is to keep the Organized Left from winning control of the U. S. House of Representatives.

But when our own Tenth District incumbent Frank Wolf develops chronic tin ear, it puts conservatives in a hard place.

On the one hand, Wolf-challenger Judy Feder would be a consistent and diligent advocate of big and intrusive government.

Whatever expansive government schemes Mr. Wolf might flirt with and nurture, we can be sure that Mrs. Feder would proceed in lock step with the House Democratic Caucus, systematically to rein in both our enterprise and our liberties.

On the other hand, conservatives must have the forebearance of a saint in coming to terms with Mr. Wolf’s unrevealed earmarks and his apparent indifference to our property rights.

A just-released Congressional scorecard under the auspices of the American Land Rights Association gives Mr. Wolf only a 68 per cent rating - - - compared with 100 per cent ratings for four other Virginia U. S. Representatives (Eric Cantor, Thelma Drake, Virgil Goode, and Bob Goodlatte).

Read the rest of this entry »

Last July 17, in one of the House of Representatives leadership’s less prescient moments, that body approved arguably the largest earmark of modern times — $1.5 billion to the management-challenged Metro transit system. This stand-alone package (HR 3496) authored by Representative Tom Davis and supported by Representative Frank Wolf, two Virginia Republicans, has a special gift for the unwary taxpayer. In Heritage’s Ron Utt’s words:

As troubling as this inequitable transfer would be, Mr. Davis’s proposal also requires that, as a condition of Metro receiving the $1.5 billion federal bailout, all communities in its service area establish a “dedicated funding source” (a euphemism for a tax increase) to match the federal subsidy.

The danger is that this succubus could be attached to a genuinely urgent Senate vehicle and slide through to the president’s desk where veto pens may still be on order, if not under construction. Mr. Davis has no shame about standing behind this measure, and, consistently, voted for greater transparency on earmarks last Thursday. Mr. Wolf, on the other hand, appparently believes that the less sunshine the better on such dark matters and voted the other way on sunshine.

Some old-line Virginia Republicans, even if not entirely comfortable with these raids on the U. S. Treasury in behalf of local outstretched hands, nonetheless object to such public scrutiny of Republican spending during an election year. What they entirely miss is that this kind of egregious spending jeopardizes the House Republican majority nationally even if such Congressional largesse may go down relatively smoothly in northern Virginia.