This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 30th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Senator Tom Coburn's long-time fight against wasteful spending won a small victory in knocking down the so-called

Tomnibus bill, a Frankenstein of dozens of spending bills that would create all manner of

new programs. But is this just election year wrangling or is something more

important animating the US Senate in blocking the legislation and slowing down

somewhat the process of spending your money.

Jeff Patch, a Budget Fellow at the Cato Institute, comments.

The bill is called the Advancing America's Priorities Act.

It's a very vague title and what happened was that

Democrats led by majority leader Harry Reed lumped 35 bills into one bill. it's about 400 pages long,

because Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma,

who's known as an opponent of wasteful spending,

had objected to the bills. Normally such individual bills that are relatively

non-controversial could even pass on a voice vote, but because Coburn put a hold on

the bills it required Senator Reed to spend up to a week of legislative time

working on these bills.

And so it just presented a huge burden

for the majority that wanted to pass all these programs.

And so Senator Reed decided to get around that by lumping all the 35 bills into one to try

to pick off Republicans that are either supporting parts of the bill.

For example, I think each of the bill had at least one Republican sponsor and to also target Republicans in close

...