Mississippi’s Senior Senator, Roger Wicker, has been pushing for two things–a simple, full accounting of Coast Guard needs as well as full funding for the Coast Guard. And he’s gotten none of them. As you can tell from his comments, in the article here, the Senator is fed up.
That’s good. Maybe some righteous indignation for a good cause can help get the Coast Guard the money it needs to move ahead over the next couple of decades. And if we can get the Coast Guard in a good place for the price of a big-deck amphib, that’s…an investment well worth the money.
The problem here though, is that the Coast Guard is a popular cause. It’s so popular, everybody wants to freight Coast Guard funding proposals with a lot of junk. We never really get a stand up “yes-no” vote on pure Coast Guard funding. It either gets lumped in with a whole bunch of extra garbage — like in the infrastructure amendment, or there’s some other poison pill addition that makes Coast Guard funding unpalatable.
But even a stand-alone Coast Guard funding bill has poison pills. Wicker’s Coast Guard bill tacked on a request for funding the Coast Guard during government shutdowns. Now, I’m a Democrat, and, while I really want to see Coast Guard folks get funded during shutdowns, I sure as heck don’t want to make it any easier for my Republican colleagues to shut down the government. I believe shutting down the government is a serious proposition, and steps to make shutdowns as politically-painless as possible are wrong.
We need more irked Senators out there who are willing to help get the Coast Guard ready for the next couple of decades. For once, let’s go get the Coast Guard fully funded.
