Posted on 06/25/2006 4:22:45 PM PDT by calcowgirl
We'll toss him out soon enough.
Another bad moonbat rising.
Earmarks are a horrible budget bill feature. I mean 1,500+ earmarks added to a budget bill three days before the vote is held. With a majority of them basically submitted anonymously. That's just absurd. They most certainly need to be eliminated.
I won't be in November but he should be able to be knocked out in 2 years.
Didn't take him long to belly up to the trough, did it? If the votes occured the day he arrived he could have legitimately abstained since there is no way he could be at all familiar with the details he was voting on. But instead his first vote was for pork and the second for a pay raise. He'll fit right in.
No highway money, no education funds?
Help me figure out the difference between earmarks and getting some of your money back from Washington.
I thought I outlined the problem with earmarks in my post. Does it make sense to you that legislatures should be able to attach their own pork to a budget at the last minute without discussion or review and without any attribution as to who has requested the public funds? If you have no problem with earmarks as currently embodied then I doubt I could convince you otherwise.
Over a dozen years ago a group of congressmen wanted to make it a law that nothing, NOTHING, be added to a bill that wasn't directly related to that bill.
That quest went no where.
I do not know the answer. Other than throw the bums out, all of them, and start over.
I hear the fat lady singing.
"NOTHING, be added to a bill that wasn't directly related to that bill."
That's exactly whqat should happen!
Yes I do object to Congressmen bringing home money for local projects! If they can't be funded locally they aren't worthwhile.
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
In return there is something called Revenue Sharing.
From what I can see.....New York wants everyone else's share of the Revenue Sharing.
But that's another topic.
Townhall.com, Jun 25, 2006
by Paul Jacob
When the felonious Duke — that is, Duke Cunningham, former U.S. Rep from California's 50th District — left office last December, we had every reason to hope for something better, someone at least a little less criminal. We even had hopes for honesty!
And things looked up. A candidate entered the running promising to cut back on pork.
Candidate Brian Bilbray had been to Congress before, and he looked back on that time fondly, claiming to have been on the right side in 1995. "There's still more to do," he clarified in his recent campaign. He went so far as to offer a specific: "not allowing members of congress to put in private so-called earmarks for funding."
So of course he won the special election. That's how he gained the incumbency advantage for the next election, all on an interim position requiring a mere seven months of capitol industry.
While the ship of state creaked just a bit, allowing on one more captain to help decide her course, some of us wondered: how long will it take to corrupt the man? Terms? Years? Months?
More like: one week.
Bilbray was in the House just a handful of days when he voted for the latest appropriation bill, this one with over 1500 earmarks.
Fifteen hundred! Well, maybe the country just couldn't get along without that bill. Maybe we should let it slide. Pork is bad, but not that bad, not bad enough to risk the stability of the state.
But what can we say about Bilbray's voting down each of Representative Jeff Flake's four anti-pork amendments? That's not one no, not a mere two, not even three.
That's four nos. (I feel like Abraham deciding the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Peradventure, do I hear five?)
I guess this is Bilbray's idea of the Reagan Legacy, the sole remnant of his commitment to less government: "Just Say No."
He can't hide, however, what he's saying "no" to: his own promises.
So that's the Bilbray Story. But what's the Rest of the Story?
Before the special election Bilbray seemed to be fighting a bit of an uphill battle. You see, he had been a lobbyist for several years. The opposition made much of this. Jadedly, he admitted, "Everyone is trying to say that everyone in Washington is tainted."
Hmmm. I wonder why. Could it be because everyone in Washington is tainted?
Well, I'm not even that cynical; I know a few good people in Sodom, a few more in Gomorrah.
But Bilbray certainly is tainted. Thus we add another crumbum into the ranks of the congressional crumbumhood.
I have no doubt that he read it, or at least understood exactly what it said. The same goes for his other 4 "No" votes on the anti-earmark legislation. See article above from Townhall.
Maybe in two years. For now, though, he hasn't shown himself to be any worse than his challenger Francine Busby (D-"you don't need papers for voting"), who would probably oppose the anti-pork amendments or other general spending cuts.
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