Congress Is Still Pursuing Earmarks
By CARL HULSE
New York Times
WASHINGTON — It has a been a difficult few years for earmarks, the pet spending projects that lawmakers pursue in Congress. They have been linked to felony cases, blamed for the national debt, stripped from the budget, exposed to public scrutiny and subjected to ridicule. Yet earmarks and the lawmakers who love them will not be denied.
Despite an intense campaign by critics in and out of Congress against home-state projects, the year-end budget sent to President Bush on Wednesday was stuffed with almost 9,000 of them. They ran from one side of the country to the other, from $500,000 for the Los Banos bypass for Merced County, Calif., to $300,000 for a child development center in Wewahitchka, Fla.
The bounty, estimated by the group Taxpayers for Common Sense at almost $8 billion, reached the point that The Hill, a newspaper that follows Congress, carried the banner front-page headline: “An Earmark Christmas.”
Sponsors of the varied projects that are the bread-and-butter of the rank-and-file say lawmakers who won those dollars have nothing to hide. Instead, they say, they should gloat.
“I can’t wait to put out a press release to tell people what I have done,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and an earmarker of long standing.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
WASHINGTON — It has a been a difficult few years for earmarks, the pet spending projects that lawmakers pursue in Congress. They have been linked to felony cases, blamed for the national debt, stripped from the budget, exposed to public scrutiny and subjected to ridicule. Yet earmarks and the lawmakers who love them will not be denied.
Despite an intense campaign by critics in and out of Congress against home-state projects, the year-end budget sent to President Bush on Wednesday was stuffed with almost 9,000 of them. They ran from one side of the country to the other, from $500,000 for the Los Banos bypass for Merced County, Calif., to $300,000 for a child development center in Wewahitchka, Fla.
The bounty, estimated by the group Taxpayers for Common Sense at almost $8 billion, reached the point that The Hill, a newspaper that follows Congress, carried the banner front-page headline: “An Earmark Christmas.”
Sponsors of the varied projects that are the bread-and-butter of the rank-and-file say lawmakers who won those dollars have nothing to hide. Instead, they say, they should gloat.
“I can’t wait to put out a press release to tell people what I have done,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and an earmarker of long standing.
(Continued here.)
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