The WSJ sums up pretty nicely why I am hoping Republicans lose control of the House:

Don’t Cross this Bridge

Every time we think various preposterous Bridges to Nowhere in Alaska are history, they somehow get resurrected. One gigantic bridge — as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and designed to connect Anchorage with the Matanuska-Susitna Borough — has more lives than Freddy, the Nightmare on Elm Street.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that formal hearings on construction plans will be held next week. Worse yet, the State of Alaska has created the Knik Arm Bridge and Toll Authority, whose primary mission in life is evidently to promote the bridge and make sure it gets built without any more taxpayer watchdog group interference. The price tag is estimated at $450 million — $93 million of which so far is slated to come from federal funds.

Now even Alaskans are starting to smell burnt pork because one of the first official acts of this commission was to increase its own pay from $90,000 to $130,000. As Aurah Landau of the Alaska Coalition, a citizens’ group opposed to the bridge, noted with heavy sarcasm: “These officials must feel they’ve been working hard over the past year.” One of the board members, Daryl Jordan said that once the construction plan was drawn up, it was time for a pay raise. He told the Anchorage Daily News: “I know it looks kind of screwy, but you’ve got to look at the other factors involved.” Kind of?

The U.S. House was so embarrassed by the project last spring that it voted to cut off any federal dollars. But the Senate balked, so now when all is said and done, more than half the bridge’s costs could be paid from federal gas taxes collected from motorists in the lower 48. Even more astounding, it now appears that the second Bridge to Nowhere, Ketchikan’s Gravina Island Bridge, may go forward too. This is the $330 million bridge that will serve a small island of about 40 people. It would be cheaper to buy every resident a Lear jet. But the recently de-elected lame duck Governor Frank Murkowski has pledged to keep the money flowing.

Oh, and now the Democrats in the Alaska state legislature are reporting that the price tag for the two bridges has been deliberately low-balled and the combined cost could exceed $1 billion. Your tax dollars at work.

There are many arguments that one can make in favor of having the GOP keep the House - national security, impeachment proceedings, Pelosi being third in line for the presidency - but I think they all pose less of a risk to the very real pork barrel spending that is currently going on under the status quo. So put me as another person that is hoping the GOP loses the house, not because I think Democrats will spend less, but because gridlock itself is the strongest safeguard against pork spending.