Peanuts or Cops? Or, Peanuts for Cops
So which is more important: $16 million for out-of-date cop radios, or $74 million for peanut storage?
Well, to hear one Democrat chairwoman tell it, the cops don’t even warrant peanuts.
An amendment to the emergency war supplemental bill that would have provided the Capitol Police with $16 million to begin modernizing it’s out-of-date radio communications system was shot down last week during debate within the House Appropriations Committee.
Instead, the chairwoman of the subcommittee on the legislative branch, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), promised to deal with the issue in the fiscal 2008 appropriations bill. Doing so would provide the department’s newly installed management team to come up with its own plan for phasing in a new communication system rather than imposing a modernization plan on them, she said.
We can understand Chairwoman Wasserman Shultz’ desire for a clean supplemental (too bad others in the Caucus don’t see it that way), it’s just the fact that peanuts, spinach and citrus apparently are more important to fighting terrorists than giving the Capitol Police better communications gear.
But Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who submitted the amendment at the supplemental markup, said that waiting until 2008 to begin modernizing the radios puts the Capitol at risk.
“On Sept. 11, [2001] this Capitol was in fact a target,” Wamp said. “It could be again. I don’t want to wait until the ’08 bill.”
How does the jingle go?
“Sometimes you feel like a nut…”