Pork-Barrel Basing of the MX

Most members of the House do not consider building another 21 MX missiles to be a military necessity. Most of them probably do not really buy President Reagan’s argument that the outcome of the Geneva arms-reduction talks depends on keeping the MX program alive. But neither do they relish being accused of sabotaging the chances for successful negotiations by voting against the President on the issue. Hence the 219-213 vote Tuesday authorizing $1.5 billion for the program.

The battle over the big new missile, the first 21 of which have already been funded, is not over. The House will vote again Thursday on a bill to actually appropriate the money for the second batch of 21 missiles in the current fiscal year. But, since the Administration now has won three MX votes in the Senate and the House, MX opponents are not likely to do any better on the fourth.

The best that can be expected now is that the President’s $3-billion request for still another 48 MXs will be defeated, or at least watered down, when the fiscal 1986 military budget comes up for a vote in late summer. But we wouldn’t want to bet that reason will prevail even then.

Tuesday’s vote was preceded by a tough, energetic lobbying campaign by the White House--acampaign that reportedly included old-fashioned pork-barrel politicking in the final days before the vote. This means that the American people will really pay twice: once for the MX, and again for the favorite projects of congressmen who managed to get extra value for their votes.

The Administration, while insisting on the military need for the MX, leaned more on the argument that a vote against the MX would take pressure off the Soviets to bargain seriously in Geneva. Chief negotiator Max Kampelman, himself a Democrat, was brought back from Geneva to help make that case.

The bargaining-chip argument for the MX won’t stand scrutiny. Reagan has a lot of bargaining chips--cruise missiles, Trident 2 submarine-fired missiles and the “Star Wars” program, to name the most obvious--if he is willing to use them. A vulnerable new missile will not weigh all that heavily in the negotiations.

Most congressmen know this perfectly well. Unfortunately for the country, they weren’t sure that voters would see things that way. So they ignored their responsibility to halt a multi-billion-dollar program that has more to do with presidential pride than with military necessity.