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Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson likes to portray himself as small government conservative. His record in the United States Senate, however, doesn’t support that claim.

For one thing, he voted in favor of the single largest, most wasteful, unnecessary and unpopular big government program in recent history: The invasion and occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of billions of dollars have already been thrown away into the misadventure, which is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal budget deficit. Yet, Fred Thompson still supports the spending.

Fred Thompson’s big government spending ways go back a lot farther than that, of course. Back in 1995, he outdid every previous attempt at big government spending. Fred Thompson tried to put pork barrel spending into the Constitution of the United States of America.

The ultimate chutzpah of Fred Thompson’s attempt to create what another senator called “constitutional pork” is that he tried to insert that spending into a proposed Balanced Budget Amendment. The committee report on the proposed amendment shows that Senator Thompson wanted to create an exemption in the Constitution that protected the federal subsidy of his favorite homestate pet project from budget cuts, the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was subsidized by about 70 million dollars in spending from the federal government every year.

When it came to the idea of balancing the federal budget, Fred Thompson expected budget cuts to apply to everything and anyone other than himself and his own projects. We can expect this same attitude from Fred Thompson if he becomes president: Sacrifices are for other people to make, not Fred Thompson.

(Sources: Boston Globe, September 28, 2006; Washington Post, February 23, 1995; Congressional Record, February 23, 1995)