2,300 earmarks included in Congress' spending bill
Heard this quoted on Bennett's morning radio show - Istook was hosting. Business as usual in DC.
This doesn't include the payoffs to groups like ACORN, La Raza, etc that the disgraceful Barney Frank and Chris Dodd put in the bailout bill.
By Robert Pear
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
September 26, 2008
WASHINGTON – As Congress tried to cobble together a plan to spend huge sums on a financial bailout, lawmakers also moved yesterday toward final approval of an omnibus spending bill with more than 2,300 pet projects, including a $2 million study of animal hibernation.
Big spenders
Each legislative chamber's apparent leader in number of earmarks secured:
Sen. Ted Stevens,
R-Alaska
39 items
$238.5 million
Rep. John P. Murtha,
D-Pa.
30 items
$111 million
Many lawmakers had promised to go on a diet, but their appetite for the pet projects, known as earmarks, has returned as Congress finishes its work for the year and Election Day looms less than six weeks away.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group, calculates that earmarks account for $6.6 billion of the omnibus bill's cost, which totals more than $630 billion. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who is on trial a few blocks from the Capitol on ethics charges related to financial disclosure, appears to have gotten more earmarks than anyone else: 39 items totaling $238.5 million, according to the organization's tally.
Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., was the apparent winner in the House, with 30 items totaling $111 million, including $24.5 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center in Johnstown, his hometown.
Murtha told reporters that earmarks were just a tiny fraction of “what the administration wants to bail out those rich guys in New York.”
Other lawmakers said the earmarks were a way of tossing a few bones to Main Street before the Treasury pours hundreds of billions of dollars onto Wall Street.
The omnibus spending bill, passed Wednesday in the House, with the Senate expected to follow suit soon, includes $488 billion for the Defense Department in the coming fiscal year, which begins Wednesday. Military earmarks account for about 1 percent of that sum, Murtha noted, and the $700 billion rescue plan for the nation's financial system would cost nearly 150 times as much as they will.
Earmark critics, who gained momentum last year, were like voices in the wilderness this week.
“This all may seem a little trivial in a week that we may approve $700 billion,” said Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who has led the campaign against earmarks.
The omnibus spending bill includes no earmarks for the major presidential candidates, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama.
McCain has denounced earmarks for years, saying they distort and corrupt the legislative process. Obama has obtained earmarks in the past, but in March he endorsed a one-year moratorium so Congress could re-examine the way they are awarded.
Many earmarks go to universities. Some go to small businesses, and some to big corporations.
Stevens got $2 million for the University of Alaska to study “hibernation genomics.”
Martha A. Stewart, director of federal relations for the university, said scientists were studying the hibernation of Alaskan ground squirrels and black bears. If medics could induce a state of hibernation in humans, she said, they might be able to increase the survival chances of wounded troops being evacuated from the battlefield.
Far from being ashamed of their earmarks, some lawmakers cite them as evidence of their political strength and their ability to help constituents.
Rep. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., and Sen. Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, got $15 million to clean up the site of an old munitions factory in Waterbury. The city had help from a lobbyist, A. David Giordano, who was deputy manager of Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign.
“Earmarks should ultimately go away and be replaced by a merit-based process of grant allocation,” Murphy said in an interview. But, he added, Connecticut's share of federal grants has shrunk under President Bush, and “the Defense Department has some responsibility to clean up the properties that it helped pollute.”
Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., obtained $800,000 for the Pentagon to spend on a drug treatment for a skin condition, pseudofolliculitis barbae, popularly known as shaving bumps or razor bumps. The drug is made by a small pharmaceutical company in the St. Louis area.
“The Defense Department has long recognized pseudofolliculitis barbae as a serious dermatological condition that disproportionately affects African-American and Hispanic men, and up to 33 percent of active-duty military men,” said Shana Marchio, a spokeswoman for Bond. This condition not only causes painful lesions but also “affects combat readiness and personal safety,” by making it more difficult for men to use gas masks and oxygen masks, Marchio said.
In January, Bush issued an executive order telling federal officials to disregard earmarks unless they were explicitly included in the text of legislation. But Congress has apparently found a way around the president's order. The omnibus spending bill says the list of earmarks, though not included in the bill, “are hereby required by law to be carried out” by federal agencies, just as if they were in the bill.
signonsandiego.com |
