Conservatives Place Hold on Obama's Global Poverty Bill

CNSNews.com ^ | February 25, 2008 | Pete Winn

[Man50D]

Two conservative members of the U.S. Senate have anonymously placed a hold on Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) global poverty bill, Cybercast News Service has learned.

The effort is an attempt to slow down the progress of a bill (S. 2433) that conservative analysts say could eventually force the U.S. to increase its foreign aid by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, a conservative media watchdog, said S. 2433 has been getting "a pass" from Congress. It received absolutely no scrutiny in the House last fall, when it was passed on a voice vote, and no scrutiny last week in the Senate, when the Foreign Relations Committee also passed it on a voice vote.

"They never held any hearings on this bill in either body - none whatsoever," said Kincaid. "They never heard from people like me, who monitor the U.N. for a living, about what was in it and what it means. You can be sure that people in the foreign aid lobby completely understand what's in it."

Officially, S. 2433 declares it to be U.S. policy to help reduce global poverty and eliminate extreme global poverty. It also commits the U.S. to achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme global poverty in half by 2015 and directs the president to create a strategy to help reduce global poverty.

The legislation had been languishing in the Senate, but Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-Del.) placed it on a fast-track in recent weeks as Obama's presidential campaign started heating up.

The Illinois Democrat praised Biden and the committee's ranking Republican, Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, for "moving so quickly." Obama is the chief Senate sponsor of the bill.

[Delacon]

Why are Republicans in Congress trying to help Barack Obama?

Republicans allowed a bill that carries his name, among nine others, to pass the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by voice vote last week – without any hearings. That means there was no roll-call vote so no member can be held accountable. The same bill passed the House by voice vote last year.

The Obama bill passed out of committee with the cooperation of the co-sponsor, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. A Rhodes scholar like former President Bill Clinton, Lugar has never seen a United Nations enhancement he didn’t like.

Obama’s costly, dangerous and altogether bad bill (S. 2433), which could come up in the Senate any day, is called the Global Poverty Act. It would commit U.S. taxpayers to spend 0.7 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on foreign handouts, which is at least $30 billion over and above the exorbitant and wasted sums we already give away overseas.

The bipartisan bill would require the president “to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global poverty, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide, between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 per day.”

The bill’s other co-sponsors include Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Russ Feingold, D-Wis., Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., Charles Hagel, R-Neb., and Robert Mendez, D-N.J.

We should be on guard any time politicians use the word “comprehensive,” an umbrella word that always shades a lot of mischief. The notion that U.S. taxpayers should or could cut in half the number of people worldwide who live in poverty by 2015 is ridiculous.
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