Bipartisan Scandal: Congress' Edifice Complex

Living politicians building 'Monuments to Me.'

Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, is intent on raising $30 million for a new academic center in his New York district -- a center with his name on it. After securing an earmark and two other federal grants totaling some $2.6 million for the project, the Democratic Congressman wrote letters on his Congressional stationery to businesses with interests before his committee. The letters sought meetings to help him fulfill his "personal dream" of seeing the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service completed.

The House Ethics Committee will examine the propriety of Mr. Rangel's requests, but the bigger question is why Congress hands out money to name buildings, bridges -- everything under the sun -- after its own living members. Until roughly the 1960s, people had to die before a grateful nation memorialized them in granite. The Lincoln Memorial wasn't dedicated until a full half century after the Great Emancipator's death. Ditto for Franklin Roosevelt. George Washington had to wait 89 years for his memorial.

Now it seems almost every committee chairman gets some "Monument to Me" named after himself with the tab going to the taxpayer. There's a navigation lock in Pennsylvania named after Rep. C.W. "Bill" Young, the former GOP chair of the House Appropriations Committee. He represents St. Petersburg, Fla. -- his only connection to Pennsylvania is that he happened to be born there. Nor is that Mr. Young's only monument. The C.W. Young Center for Bio-Defense and Emerging Infectious Disease was dedicated at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., last year.

Indeed, the NIH campus is replete with monuments to the Congressional patrons who shoveled cash to it. Buildings there honor still-living pols such as Mark Hatfield, Louis Stokes and Lowell Weicker. Attempts in 2006 to have the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta name its "Global Communications Center" after Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) and its operations center after Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) were blocked at the last minute by Congressional grinches such as Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) and John Campbell (R., Calif.).

Rep. Campbell says that members of Congress cover for each other when it comes to glory grabs. Last year, the two-term lawmaker objected to an earmark for Mr. Rangel's academic center because "spending taxpayer funds in the creation of things named after ourselves while we're still here" was inappropriate. He was swatted down on a bipartisan 316-108 vote. Mr. Rangel, who has been in office since 1971, dismissed Mr. Campbell's objection: "I would have a problem if you did it, because I don't think that you've been around long enough ... to inspire a building like this."

If longevity in Congress is linked to the number of projects named after a living member, the Immortality Prize clearly goes to Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. John Stossel of ABC News found the Democrat's name attached to three dozen taxpayer-funded entities in his state, including a highway interchange, education and technology centers and even a telescope. Josh Hagen, a geographer at Marshall University in West Virginia, says all that name-dropping clearly confers benefits. "Name recognition is a big plus for a politician," he told the Associated Press. "All place names create a kind of invincibility."

Indeed, Mr. Byrd is unrepentant, telling Congress in 2001: "Pork has been a good investment in West Virginia, if you look around and see what I have done." Taxpayers for Common Sense notes it's easy for him to say that when he's spending other people's money, and asks what's next: rechristening the state "West 'Byrd'ginia?"

Some politicians are now spreading this name recognition to their spouses. How else to explain the Erma Ora Byrd Hall, a 37,000 square foot facility at Shepherd University (Shepherdstown, W. Va.) named after Mr. Byrd's late wife? Or the Joyce Murtha Breast Cancer Center in Wendber, Pa., named after the wife of House Appropriations honcho John Murtha? He already has the matching John P. Murtha Regional Cancer Center named after himself in nearby Johnstown.

In Arkansas, former Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and his wife Janet have a lake named after themselves. There is also the Janet Huckabee Nature Center.

It was the constant naming of projects like that that stirred Arkansas state Rep. Dan Greenberg to action. Last year, he introduced the "Edifice Complex Prevention Bill" to put limits on the practice in the state. "I discovered a local park had been named after me and other legislators without my knowledge," he told me. "But that wasn't enough for one legislator who complained that the sign with her name on it wasn't in her campaign colors."

Mr. Greenberg's fellow legislators treated him like the proverbial skunk at the picnic. His bill was killed in committee on an 11-3 vote, with one legislator pulling him aside and bluntly asking him "Now tell me the truth, wouldn't you like a building named after you?" Mr. Greenberg says he would if he paid for it, but the practice of "using taxpayer money to build temples to ourselves as public servants is dangerous." He plans to reintroduce his proposal again next year.

One reason to restrict the practice of naming infrastructure after living politicians, notes Mr. Greenberg, is that they're still around to embarrass us. After Rep. Robert Ney, an Ohio Republican, pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2006, the athletic center named after him at Ohio University was quietly "rebranded."

In 2000, Georgia renamed its old Memorial Drive in Atlanta after Rep. Cynthia McKinney. She promptly proceeded to accuse the Bush administration of knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and then assaulted a Capitol Hill police officer, incidents which led to her eventual defeat. Attempts to remove her name from the parkway have nonetheless failed.

Still, some progress has been made. A Georgia state legislative committee has ruled that only people with national or regional recognition who have been out of office for two years or are dead can be honored by having something named after themselves.

But the simple truth is that in most cases the only effective curbs on the Edifice Complex are self-restraint and sometimes shame. An example of restraint came last year when former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson asked that a stretch of highway back home not be named "Fred Thompson Boulevard." "It is entirely appropriate that it remain Highway 43, the way I remember it was when I was a boy," he wrote state legislators trying to confer the honor.

As for shame, that clearly has its limits. Last month, Mr. Rangel was asked if he is likely to seek a fourth federal appropriation to help build the academic center named after him. "I will be trying again to get earmarks," he told the Washington Post. "I try to help my community as much as I can." But if that's the case why does his name have to be on it?

Comments

[SamEllison]

Torture = good
Building names = bad
John, will it ever end?

[OligarchyNot]

I'm fron Atlanta, and we've had a rash of politicians having streets renamed after themselves, at a cost of approximately $60,000 each time. The problem with paying to memorialize a street or building with the name of someone still living is that they could do something so heinous later in life that it causes people to want remove that person's name from the street or building. What if we had paid to memorialize Tom Delay by changing the name of a K Street to Delay Street (which might actually be appropriate in some ways)? Would it seem appropriate to you to memorialize someone who ended up being indicted? Yet, in order to change Delay Street back to K Street, it would cost the same amount of money, all coming from the taxpayers pocket. I think the rule should be that you must have died in order to be memorialized using taxpayer funds. It just irks me that our representatives are up there voting for each other's living memorials, at our expense, while they virtually ignore their constituents wishes; that they and their spouses are set for life in their retirement, while the rest of us are watching daily as our economy and our hopes of a comfortable retirement fly out the window; that they have the best health coverage that money can buy while the rest of us either have no health coverage or deductibles so high that we have to have a catastrophic condition to use it.

[Snowball]

Hmm, seems to me that an academic center might do a lot of good helping to lift people out of the cycle of poverty and that Rangle has been a driving force behind it. It's only fitting it should bear his name.

Oh, and Byrd's highway interchange, education and technology centers, oh the horrors that we should build our infrastructure and educate our people. What a waste of tax dollars, oh my!

These are just the kind of projects I want my tax dollars to go for. A permanent occupation of Iraq in spite of the Iraqis pleading for us to leave? Not so much so.

[gevan]

I'm pretty sure that all those named ARE dead.

[dogman44]

Okay, one more time. The San francisco sewage treatment plant is the perfect memorial to Boosh.
And the neighbors say it smells bad, how appropriate!

[dogman44]

Even though he's still alive, I think San Francisco's sewage treatment plant is a perfect memorial
to bear GWB's name. I hear the locals complain about the smell, how appropriate!

[krm1255]

LOL! If they don't do it themselves, they're pretty sure no one else will.

[rbspickles]

It's called EGOMANIACS! They are so far from the average American mindset that it's like they are from Mars or something. Sheeshe, we really need to VOTE every one of these ingrates out of office!

[LeonBNJ]

The naming of government facilities after politicans should only after they have been dead more than 2 years and cannot include persons who were convicted of crimes, were active racists or had other issues of moral character.

[arkgrfx61]

Hear Hear!
I'd love to take back the name of National Airport from Ronald Reagan National Airport...(I refuse to call it by that absurd name)

[notnuffsaid]

I may be wrong but wasn't this practice begun manyh years ago when Republicans started this naming game with the Ronald Reagan Airport or something like that... and yet good ol' public spirited John Fund has only now with Charlie Rangel discovered this rterrible scandal.
Hello!!!

[sls642]

I think a politician should be dead at least ten years before anything is named after them. Sort of like Hall of Fame voing.

[unitron]

How about if they have to be dead at least ten years before being allowed to run for elected office in the first place?

[tykoto]

A few years ago, the Daniel Boone Parkway in Kentucky was renamed the Hal Rogers Parkway. The local residents were furious. When they complained, they were told that to change the name back would cost too much money!

(For those who are curious, Hal Rogers is the Republican representative of Kentucky's 5th Congressional District.)

Who, outside of Kentucky, has even heard of Hal Rogers? Now ask anyone in the country who Daniel Boone is.

Need I say more?

[yoshi]

We have the (choke) Ted Stevens International Airport here in Anchorage, and Don Young wanted to name one of his bridges to nowhere after himself.

[jp916]

That is the only thing about visiting your beautiful state that made me want to hurl...having that name on your airport!!!

[berkeleygirl1962]

USPS stamp policy--10 years dead--is reasonable. Private commemorations are one thing, but never, ever put the endorsement of government on any level on a living person, who may yet live to disgrace their name, on a public edifice. "Steve Garvey Junior High" leaps to mind.

[DXM]

There is a simple solution: A law banning Federally funded building, structures, ships, etc. from being named after a living individual or group of individuals... PERIOD!