Senate Votes to Keep the Pork Flowing
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in CongressWell, this is really no surprise. Despite the support of John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all of whom returned to Washington for the vote, the Senate overwhelmingly rejected a one-year ban on earmarks. Only 29 senators voted in favor of the measure.
Earmarks are the primary way our congressmen and women bring home the bacon to their states and districts. They claim that congressionally directed spending (the fancy name for the practice) is necessary to make sure their constituents do not get forgotten by Washington bureaucrats. There is something to that argument but it doesn’t hide the fact that earmarks also create systematic overspending. There need to be stronger prohibitions on their use but as long as voters keep rewarding their senators and representatives for brining in pork barrel projects, earmark measures will not pass. Few elected officials are going to willingly remove one of the key methods used to secure voter support and win reelection.
Ultimately, the vote yesterday was a nice showpiece for the three presidential candidates but the meassure never had a chance.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 and is filed under Congress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:12 am
Have you ever heard of proof reading? The dismal state of grammar usage on the internet never ceases to amaze me.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Ouch. Man, you let a typo (o.k., two typos, both now fixed) get through and get smacked down by the grammar police. My endless quest for perfection has fallen short once again.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:35 am
The “Line Item Veto Act of 1996″ was supposed to help fix this very serious detriment to a balanced federal budget. Strangely enough, it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1998 in Clinton vs The City of New York. The most surprising thing in all this was the initial law in 1996 was challenged by 6 US Senators - Levin, Hatfield, Byrd, Moynihan, and 2 others - they were all Democratic. So Earmark control may seem like a good idea to the “fiscally responsible” democrats, but they are the one’s who killed what could have been a very effective law.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Earmarks don’t increase spending. They dictate how funds get spent, which is the responsibility of the congress. No earmarks means more executive power, not less spending.
March 14th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Doc,
Actually, budgets are increased in order to fit in all the pork created by earmarks. Thus, earmarks encourage spending. And they encourage reckless spending as congressmen and women compete to funnel federal dollars into their district by whatever means are necessary, even when that includes funding less than needed projects. I think there is definitely room for earmarking, I just think the current system leads to abuse.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Regarding spending, if you look at the total earmark expenditures, even if you consider it all new spending, it does not rise to the level of a pimple on the ass of our Federal Budget.
That said, earmarks are a malignant cancer in the body politic. They permit legalized bribery of our elected representatives. They permit our elected representatives to participate and profit from “Dishonest Graft” as distinct from “Honest Graft”. “Dishonest Graft” being a practice that was shunned by George Washington Pickett - one of the most corrupt politicians in the most corrupt political systems (Tammany Hall - New York) in the history of America. “Dishonest Graft” was shunned by Pickett but is practiced frequently through the use of earmarks by our legislators today.
There is no room for earmarking in our system, it completely subverts the intent of the constitution on how public funds should be allocated and spent. This vote assures that after a few years of unified Democratic party government, we will be seeing dozens of Democratic Party legislators doing perp walks, just like we have been seeing it with Republicans in the post Abramoff post unifed Republican government era.
This vote was a very sad day for America.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Hmm… ok, well I’ll concede to that. It seems to me like a chicken-or-the egg situation. A big part of the reason our representatives are fighting so hard to get money back is that, with income and inflation taxes being as big a burden as they are, we have become dependent on federal funds. This would not be the case if we just had fewer spending bills available to earmark.
I do like, however, how Obama came out last year and made public every earmark he authored. He challenged all the other candidates to do the same and Ron Paul was the only one to take him up on it.