Posted earlier today as the daily commentary on right-leaning political website Flashreport is a stinging editorial in which the website's publisher/editor launches yet another in an ongoing series of broadsides against San Bernardino County Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis (CD 41). In addition to Fleischman's duties on Flashreport, the website editor is also the California Republican Party's Southern Vice-Chair, a post which covers Riverside County. Ostensibly, then, Fleischman's role in this capacity is to elect and encourge the election of Republican nominees, such as veteran GOP Congressman Jerry Lewis (who represents Riverside County) to public office.

In Fleischman's opinion piece, the Orange County-based professional political consultant/internet editor/Republican partisan activist slams Congressman Lewis for supposedly being a "passionate defender of a pork-barrel system on Capitol Hill that clearly played a role in the Republican's loss of the House of Representatives last year.  Lewis constantly pushes the primacy of the "Appropriators" as being a cut-above other members, and rather infamously has opposed repeated efforts by House conservatives to push alternative budget proposals that would include across-the-board spending cuts."

Fleischman would be left for the wiser to read an editorial penned by Congressman Jerry Lewis - a federal lawmaker so popular he's been elected 15 times by the constituents who know him best. Initially published in the Washington, DC-based insider publication The Hill, and re-posted on Red County San Bernardino, Congressman Jerry Lewis wrote:

The appropriations process is one of Congress’s most important responsibilities, but many both inside and outside the Beltway misunderstand it. The recent controversies surrounding the work of the Appropriations committee has compounded the confusion over what we do.

The United States’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and other Founding Fathers worked hard to protect America’s taxpaying public from the gluttonous appetite of its growing government. Article I, Section 9 of our Constitution states, “No money shall be drawn from the treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”

Today, a vast array of federal government programs is funded through 12 different subcommittees. Approximately one-half of the money appropriated goes to fund our national defense, while all the other subcommittees fight to secure what they deem to be “their fair share” of the remaining pie....

If the public wants to cut our bloated government spending, they certainly did not buy it in the last election. The leadership of this Congress has so far demonstrated that the preferred solution is to take more money from the taxpayer. A few suggest that the real problem is pork barrel spending, but this is difficult to sell when earmarks represent only about one percent of all discretionary spending. Furthermore, earmarks do not add to spending; they merely redirect it. Eliminating earmarks just allows that money to be spent by the non-elected bureaucrats.

This conservative appropriator believes deeply that the Appropriations Committee must do its part in reducing spending. It is the number-one responsibility of appropriators in the years ahead. It is not good enough to simply wish away these deficits. We cannot continue to create new programs for every difficulty we face.

Congressman Jerry Lewis' words hardly sound like those of a politician defending a pork-barrel system of unchecked expenditures. Read Lewis' opinion in its entirety here.

Simply, the Flashreport commentary presented this morning is, at best, disheartening, and at worst, dishonest.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The thoughts and opinions expressed by the "SB Insider" are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Red County San Bernardino's editor and/or members of the site's blogpen.]