Rep. Robert B. Alderholt, 4th CD of Alabama, begins his website:
Congressman Robert Aderholt voted against the big government takeover of health care on Saturday, November 7th.
This official seems to follow Sen. Richard Shelby in denigrating the Obama budget at the same time requesting 15 earmarks in the Commerce, Justice Science category for Fiscal Year 2010. His 15 requests add up to $30.6 million, for projects ranging from miniature antennas for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to Canine Detection Development to Textile and Clothing Technology. I'd say he's being ultra deceptive in his pleadings.
Republican leaders need to stop complaining about a 2,000 page Healthcare Reform bill. This section alone of the Appropriations earmarks contains 1416 pages. And there are at least ten other sections to digest!
When it comes to earmarks, I agree with Mark Schmidt: they are a phantom problem. While they are often blamed for excess spending in D.C., the truth is that they are in no way excess spending:
As policy, I'm as indifferent to the issue of earmarks as Tom Mann. They're inconsequential. Not only do they represent less than one percent of the federal budget, eliminating them wouldn't even reduce federal spending by even that tiny amount, or any amount at all, since earmarks by definition simply tag the spending in an already established pot of money, such as the Community Development Block Grant. The only question is whether decisions about funding individual projects should be made by Congress -- through earmarks -- or by a supposedly apolitical administrative process. Except for the tremendous inequities between states with clout on the Appropriations Committees and those without, Graham's argument that politicians have a legitimate role in deciding which large projects in their states should be priorities makes sense.
Like most of the problems Broder-esque cultists cite as dragging down the federal government (too partisan! too ideological! Social Security crisis!) earmarks are not actually a major, or even really a minor, problem facing the government. They don't add any spending whatsoever, as they are instead providing specific direction to money that has already been appropriated. The issue here, if any, is not financial but instead about transparency and competitive bidding. Like the expenditure of all federal money, it is a good idea to make sure that we know which lawmaker pushed it, that there has been a chance to debate it in public, and that any company which benefits from it had to go through a competitive bidding process. Those are guarantees we need not only when it comes to earmarks, but with all federal spending.
In light of this, the earmark reforms announced today by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, which are detailed in the extended entry, are perfectly adequate. This is, at best, a one-speech issue, and simply not deserving of the attention it receives given the severity of other, actual problems we face.
Waxman's investigators said they took statements from six political appointees involved in the videoconference who maintained that Doan asked her employees how they could help Republicans in the upcoming elections.
This is an aspect of the Republican crusade against Congressional earmarks that needs more attention. As usual, Republican reforms only exist to benefit Republicans. Any actual good they might do is purely incidental.
On Wednesday, John McCain visited my home city of Philadelphia. To an audience of town hall participants at the National Constitution Center, and later to an audience of country clubbers in the western suburbs, McCain restated his commitment to veto as President any spending bill that came to his desk bearing an earmarked project:
McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke the morning after a bill he supported that would have stopped earmarks - federal money dedicated to lawmakers [sic] pet projects - resoundingly failed in the U.S. Senate.
Why did McCain's bill fare so poorly that his own website reprints an article calling it a resounding failure? It's a political sideshow--not a responsible attitude towards congressional spending. Legislators rejected McCain's invitation to defer the responsibilities bestowed upon them by Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution, and with good reason.
"Anyone who had the misfortune of watching (the Senate debate the bill) knows how hard it is to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," McCain said, standing on a raised stage in front of hundreds of Republicans gathered at the Springfield Country Club just outside of Philadelphia.
Hard to say exactly how much the apocalyptic analogy resonated among golf enthusiasts, but the message rang clear to me: demonic Dems are hoarding your hard-earned cash and sending it to...PENNSYLVANIA! The horror!
If you dare to look into the soul of the tax-and-spend liberal, details on Pennsylvania's pork barrel politics await you below the fold...
Barrie's fairies are dependent on the belief of others to survive. In one famous scene, she [Tinkerbell] is dying, but will survive if enough people believe in fairies. In the play the characters make a plea to the children watching to sustain her by shouting out "I believe in fairies," and clapping, an example of "breaking the fourth wall."
Dday over at Digby's place takes note of the latest squirming in McSame's futile attempts to wriggle out of his "100 years" comment about staying in Iraq:
The unstoppable whine from the RNC over Democratic message dominance on John McCain's "100 years in Iraq" comments has now morphed into "you stole footage from a terrorist Michael Moore!"
Seems they used the same stock footage!
Q: What's better than seeing the GOP on defense?
A: Seeing how bad they are at it.
That's just beginning, of course. But doesn't get much better for the GOP. Sure the media is totally in the tank for them. But it's all just more gobbledygook, and it's all defense.
I want to highlight a theme running through the election because it could have some significant (bad) consequences if John McCain gets his way and progressives fail to understand the implications.
"Give me the pen, and I'll veto every single pork-barrel bill Congress sends me, and if they keep sending them to me, I'll use the bully pulpit to make the people who are wasting your money famous,"
As much as anyone else, I dislike parochialism and seeing money ill spent to prop up endangered incumbent congress members. But down this road is a massive executive power grab. As such progressives must understand that McCain is proposing not to end pork but to transfer all earmarking authority to the executive branch.
At yesterday's Change Congress event with Larry Lessig, Lessig presented the meme behind the campaign. Change Congress has four parts:
No PAC or lobbyist money
An End to Earmarks
Public financing of campaigns
Congressional Transparency
As with Creative Commons and copyright holders, Change Congress candidates and citizens can sign up for any and all of these pledges, matching their ideology with their pledge. It's a brilliant organizing structure. One suggestion I made was to bake national security into the dialogue upfront. Here's the question I asked Lessig, which Micah Sifry has kindly written up.
Q: From Matt Stoller, who discloses that he's done some consulting for the Sunlight Foundation. The hardest nut to crack is national security policy. Is it legitimate how secretive that is? What will you do when this movement bangs up into that wall? If everything else is transparent, then a lot of important decisions will be pushed into the national security arena.
I don't know. I do know that if earmarks were banned, that would remove some of the pressure for special deals, in the first place. I don't know how we'll deal with transparency in secret expenditures. I think there's a lot for me to learn, Lessig admits.
Several defense intelligence agencies will withhold unclassified information about their contracts from a new public database of government spending....
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) argued that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts could present an operational security vulnerability.
This is not classified information they are talking about. These departments are simply arguing that the public does not have a right to get unclassified public information. National security cannot be an absolute trump card against transparency, or else you'll get hugely ramped up spending on intelligence contractors where there is none. More fundamentally, every growing pot of money in the Federal government is basically in DHS or the Defense Department.
The Change Congress movement, and the progressive movement as a whole, needs to grapple with this question. When half of discretionary government income flows through the Pentagon, and black box budgets are growing on Capitol Hill, it's unavoidable.
Tucked away on Seattle's Portage Bay, a sleek, 85-foot speedboat sat idle for years - save for an annual jaunt to maintain its engine.
The Navy paid $4.5 million to build the boat. But months before the hull ever touched water, the Navy gave the boat to the University of Washington. The school never found a use for it, either.
Why would the Navy waste taxpayer dollars on a boat that nobody wanted?
Blame it on Sen. Patty Murray and Congressmen Norm Dicks and Brian Baird. All three exercised their political muscle to slip language into a 2002 spending bill to force the Navy to buy the boat from Edmonds shipbuilder Guardian Marine International.
Year after year, the Washington lawmakers did favors for the tiny company, inserting four "earmarks" into different bills to force the Navy and Coast Guard to buy boats they didn't ask for - $17.65 million in all. None of the boats was used as Congress intended.
The congressional trio say they were helping Guardian Marine because it had a great product. But each has also received generous campaign donations from the company's three executives, its sole employees: $14,277 to Baird, $15,000 to Murray, and $16,750 to Dicks.
This nexus, between Bush Dogs and corrupt practices, just keeps popping up. I've spoken with a number of savvy local political figures, activists and insiders, and by most accounts, Brian Baird's a terrifically smart and cynical Congressman. Whether it was voting for the Bankruptcy Bill, acting badly on Terry Schiavo, or changing his mind on the surge to pull in right-wing support, he's been able to hew a relatively conservative line on some key issues because of memories of Republican Linda Smith, the crazy evangelical he beat in 1998. Baird's upset a good number of local activists with his bad Iraq stance, and rumor has it that he reduced one longtime supporter to tears. He's also upset environmentalists on his logging work, and the distict is shifting along with the country to a more strident progressive and antiwar stance.
With this earmarked useless boat done in return for political purposes, Baird has lost even more goodwill and opened up a clear spot for a primary challenger in 2008 or 2010.
I just got done with Jeffrey Birnbaum's excellent and still timely The Lobbyists, which was published in 1993. This book, along with Brooks Jackson's wonderful Honest Graft, paint a grim and Office Space-like picture of Capitol Hill and political decision-making. The Lobbyists describes, through telling the story of a group of people trying to get R&D tax credits, more spending on Maglev trains, and capital gains tax cuts, a mixture of begging, pleading, golfing trips, astroturf, negotiations, and grasstops lobbying, with the public cut out of the process. It's a sordid petty arena where money is made mostly on the margins and once-great public servants cash out for relatively small sums.
Congress has not been living up to my expectations this week, not in the least. The vote on FISA was another let down from a Congress that has already failed to push forward aggressively on ending the War in Iraq and agricultural reform. But this week also brought a "Reporkcard" from the Club for Growth grading members of the House on their votes against earmarks. Overall Democrats have an abysmal record and I don't understand why we are handing the Republicans this issue on a silver platter.
A lesson in practical politics from the nation's representatives, courtesy of a Hillpiece from last week (I'm catching up):
Just two Democrats, Reps. Chris Carney (Pa.) and Jim Cooper (Tenn.), supported a Tuesday challenge to Rep. John Murtha's (D-Pa.) so-called $1 million "mystery" earmark.
The paltry Democratic support for that challenge is consistent with the Democratic record on efforts to strike earmarks from bills this year. In fact, several Democrats who regularly voted last year for amendments to strip earmarks out of bills are now voting against similar challenges.
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