Posted on 03/31/2008 6:43:24 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - Get out the trough, it's feeding time. Congress has decided that an election year with recession written all over it is not the time to be giving up those job-producing "pork" projects bemoaned by both parties' presidential candidates.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has quietly shelved the idea of a one-year moratorium on so-called earmarks, the $18 billion or so in pet projects that lawmakers sent to their home states this year. Senators in both parties have voted to kill the idea.
The California Democrat earlier had signaled her support for the idea of including no legislative earmarks in next year's budget. She pulled back in the face of resistance by Democratic allies and after the Senate turned a thumbs-down by a resounding 71-29 vote in mid-March.
The response to the Senate vote from rank-and-file lawmakers: They sent in so many last-minute earmark requests that a House Appropriations Committee web site seized up and the deadline for requesting pork had to be extended.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presidential candidate who will head the Republican national ticket this fall, and the GOP leader in the House, John Boehner of Ohio, spent the first two months of this year trying to persuade party colleagues to break their addiction to pet projects for at least a year.
More than three-fourths of House Republicans signed onto the plan, and Pelosi was obviously getting tired of GOP criticism on the subject.
Even so, Republicans flooded the Appropriations Committee with earmark requests, with many backers of a moratorium taking part.
"My patience is running out on earmarks, I'll tell you that," Pelosi said March 6. "I don't intend to spend a whole lot of time talking about them. We'll either have them or we won't, but we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it."
McCain's Democratic rivals, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, then joined the call for a one-year ban. But the Senate is filled with people who love to earmark, including Republicans such as Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Robert Bennett of Utah.
They opposed the idea, as did Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Ted Stevens of Alaska, who send so much money back to their states that it's a factor in their local economies. More than half of McCain's GOP colleagues abandoned him on the showdown Senate vote two weeks ago.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a former member of the pork-dispensing Appropriations Committee, also strongly opposed the moratorium, as did all but a handful of Democrats.
House Democrats like John Murtha, D-Pa., a longtime Pelosi ally who got the "porker of the year" award from Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based watchdog group, weighed in as well. If the Senate won't give up its pork, they argued, why should the House?
Earmarks for road and bridge projects, contracts for local defense companies and grants to local governments and nonprofits can mean jobs back home. Then there's the political boost that lawmakers running for re-election reap from earmarks, especially endangered freshmen like Nancy Boyda, D-Kan.
Boyda requested 67 earmarks this spring, ranging from $13,800 to help the Erie Police Department purchase surveillance cameras to $8.5 million for Kansas-produced ammunition for NATO allies fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Earmarks allow members of Congress to devote funds to projects that are important to their district — and representatives can better judge their districts' needs than some bureaucrat," Boyda wrote her constituents. "I want to make sure that Kansas taxpayers are getting their fair share of funds returning to Kansas projects — research at our universities, investment in our infrastructure and growth at our military bases."
Having preserved their right to earmark, lawmakers nonetheless shouldn't count on delivering too much before Election Day. That's because few if any of the 12 spending bills that carry earmarks are likely to be sent to President Bush before then, much less be signed by him.
One possible exception is the annual defense appropriations bill, slated to exceed $500 billion for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. The 2008 version passed last year contained $6 billion in earmarks disclosed by lawmakers, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group that tracks earmarks closely.
Many of the defense earmarks go to private firms that hire Washington lobbyists to help navigate the corridors of power in the capital city.
Murtha, who chairs the House Defense Appropriations panel, obtained $160 million worth of earmarks to lead all House members.
Bush has told Congress to cut the number and cost of earmarks in half from current levels or he'll veto spending bills. And he's told Democrats to accept a freeze on domestic programs funded by Congress each year.
Earmark advocates won't fare any better if McCain is elected. And it's not at all clear that Obama or Clinton would welcome signing an earmark-laced omnibus spending bill as one of the first acts in office.
and when ya look at the amount, 18 Billion this year, it seems like chump change when weighed against the ever burgeoning entitlement programs that do need serious attention and soon.
Obviously , Congre$$ is torn up over the issue..
McCain’s Democratic rivals, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, then joined the call for a one-year ban. But the Senate is filled with people who love to earmark, including Republicans such as Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Robert Bennett of Utah.
They opposed the idea, as did Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Ted Stevens of Alaska, who send so much money back to their states that it’s a factor in their local economies. More than half of McCain’s GOP colleagues abandoned him on the showdown Senate vote two weeks ago.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., a former member of the pork-dispensing Appropriations Committee, also strongly opposed the moratorium, as did all but a handful of Democrats.
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California’s Senators must send their earmark money to China and the Middle East, we sure don’t see it here.
Perfect. Hey, GOP, there’s your campaign commercial. Will anyone have the stones to point out Pelosi’s empty promises and make note of the fact that with the RATs in control of Congress the economy went to hell? kakistocracy!!!
bring my tax money back to my distric from washington. i don’t care if you dump it in the street, at least we will see our money again.
Each state should ban the borrowing of money from any other country. The people of each state should be up in arms over this. No more ear marks............period. If they need money, bring to the floor.
it doesn’t matter if it’s 18 billion or 180 billion. congress can’t control themselves because the public can’t control themselves.
it doesn’t matter if it’s 18 billion or 180 billion. congress can’t control themselves because the public can’t control themselves.
when ya look at the amount, 18 Billion this year, it seems like chump change when weighed against the ever burgeoning entitlement programs that do need serious attention and soon.
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Congress can do both. They can address earmarks and entitlements. Hell, they have time to drag professional baseball players up to Washington to deal with issues that MLB should handle internally.
I’d love to see each individual earmark brought up before Congress in a bill. That would slow down these vote-buying dirtbags that we have up there.
And the next step...return entitlement powers back to the states. The federal government has no business doing it.
To be fair, we were seeing the starting signs of our current economic crisis under the Republican controlled congress, and they were quite wasteful as well.
What we can make note of is the fact that this is Clinton's fault. He's the one who loosened economic regulations that have reduced transparency in the market, and allowed the sloppy handling of debt that ballooned an otherwise troublesome, but relatively minor, correction into something that spiraled out of control.
Hehe... I can see the ad now. "Her husband lost you your house and job, and she's touting it as 'experience'. Are you certain you want to risk your new job on that kind of 'experience'?"
Granted, that only works well for the Presidential race, but state elections tend to revolve around more local issues in the first place.
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