Examining the Dark Corners of an Ugly Bill
The House will be voting tonight on a huge spending proposal. This monster of a bill is a conglomeration of several smaller bills. It includes funding for Labor, HHS, Education, Veterans Affairs and military construction projects.
Democratic leaders released the text of the bill only last night so lawmakers have had less than a day to examine its contents. Well, there's a reason why the big spenders didn't want people to see it. It's all kinds of ugly.
Senator Jim DeMint issued this press release. Excerpt:
The Democrat Congress stripped a provision from the Labor-HHS-Military-VA conference report, which prohibited agencies from funding backdoor earmarks requested by lawmakers through secret phone calls and letters. Senator DeMint authored S.Amendment 3340 to ban “phonemarking,” which was unanimously approved by the Senate in October. Now that the provision has been secretly gutted in conference, there is now no rule prohibiting Members of Congress from calling cabinet secretaries to request funding for pet projects that bypass the normal competitive and merit-based allocations process.
“Democrats can’t let go of their pork and keep inventing new ways to stop new earmark disclosure rules and bypass the old ones,” said Senator DeMint. “Democrats agreed to stop secret backdoor earmarks, but now they’ve broken that promise and gutted the reforms we passed just weeks ago. There is nothing to stop politicians from picking up the phone and to pressure agencies into funding their pet projects. This is exactly why America has a crisis of confidence in Congress. Politicians say one thing and do another.”
But that's not all. Apparently, there were several earmarks that were "air-dropped" into the conference report. That means neither the House or Senate version of these original bills contained these pork projects. Air-dropping is a shady way of sneaking even more pork into bloated spending bills.
The Republican Leader's office issued this press release with some examples of these air-dropped projects, including:
- $1 million for the Thomas Daschle Center for Public Service and Representative Democracy in Brookings, South Dakota.
- $1 million for the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.
So not only are congressional leaders sneaking pork projects financed with your tax dollars into this bill, they are using that money to memorialize their retired liberal comrades.
The Influence Peddler has more details.
Taxpayer Hero Rep. Jeb Hensarling adds his two cents as well. You can bet that he'll be voting "no".
