To: DMaA who wrote (122677 ) 6/30/2005 9:38:10 AM From: Tom Clarke Read Replies (1) | Respond to I don't usually pick up Harper's, but I just might this month.came to a vote before the full House some sixteen hours later, at approximately 4:00 that afternoon, and before the Senate at 8:42 that evening. For the legislators who approved it -- by a margin of 344-51 in the House and 65-30 in the Senate -- reading the 3,320-page bill before the vote would have been a mathematical impossibility. The omnibus measure, which was completed after two feverish days of work, allocated money for 11,772 separate earmarks... In the end, the bill's earmarks were worth a combined total of nearly $16 billion -- a figure almost as large as the annual budget of the Department of Agriculture and roughly twice that of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the single biggest piece of pork-barrel legislation in American history. Of who added these grants, no public record exists. Except in rare cases, members of Congress will refuse to discuss their involvement in establishing earmarks, and the appropriateions committees have a blanket rule against commenting... Indeed, in the matter of the $16 billion burglary, and the similar acts of mass theft plotted for this year, the only certainty seems to be this: that lawmakers and lobbyists collude to conceal, to the utmost extent possible, their actions from the American taxpayer, who serves as the ultimate benefactor to their chronic bouts of generosity. The link between lawmaker and earmark is virtually impossible to make definitively. A clear paper trail, however, does exist: when requesting an earmark, lawmakers must make their request in writing to the relevant appropriations committee. But because all congressional correspondence is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, would-be watchdogs... have no way to obtain earmark requests unless they are leaked. prairieweather.typepad.com
