Wow, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), chief opponent of earmarks in the House was on fire tonight. Did anyone else see it? (Assuming you, too, found yourself riveted to C-Span on a Saturday night). Offering up nearly a dozen amendments to strike but a handful of nearly 1300 earmarks in the $460,000,000,000 Defense Appropriations bill, Flake took his time attempting to take on spurious, garrulousy worded earmarks for items like a charter school, glove manufacturers [cold-shielding hand protection-ware or something to that effect], Sherwin-Williams paint, and so on, "We cannot continue to go down this road with earmarks that are considered duplicative and wasteful".
Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) continued to rise in defense of the earmarks along with several other members from both sides of the aisle (including the perfectly contemptible Jerry Lewis of California). Pressed on continuing to fund the National Drug Intelligence Center which the Bush administration has requested be shut down declaring it unnecessary, Murtha glibbly offered up, "The Bush administration has made a few mistakes in the past...The administration believes a lot of things I disagree with".
Then, a devastating rant by Flake: "I would gladly yield time to anyone who agrees with the chairman of the Appropriations subcomittee that 1) these earmarks are competitively bid. Anybody in agreement here? or 2) that the US taxpayer, after paying for these earmarks, has the rights to the technology developed by these earmarks? Any takers there? I didn't think so. That is simply wrong. An earmark by definition is a sole source contract, it is circumventing the competitive bidding process. Now maybe you don't like what the bureaucrats over in the Defense department do, but to say that this is a competitively bid contract is simply wrong...if anybody can contradict, please take time."
No one rose to argue this point. However, they did shout him down on every amendment he proposed to strike earmarks. Some Congress we have. Press on, young Mr. Flake, fighitng the good fight against wasteful spending; thank you for not sticking to your 2000 campaign pledge to only serve three terms in the House. Without you, things would....be exactly the same unfortunately. Spotlighted on last week's Bill Moyers Journal, Mr. Flake was credited with getting one earmark stricken from the last appropriations bill, saving taxpayers a negligible $129,000. It's a start, and though things may look bleak, lets hope that's not where it ends:
Perhaps the most frequent justification for the contemporary practice of earmarking is that, quote, 'Members of Congress know their districts better than some faceless bureaucrat in Washington' But, let's face it: when we approve congressional earmarks for indoor rainforests in Iowa or teapot museums in North Carolina, we make the most spendthrift faceless bureaucrat look frugal...The truth is, we can try all we want to conjure up some sort of noble pedigree for the contemporary practice of earmarking, but we are just drinking our own bathwater if we think the public is buying it. It seems that over the past few years we've tried to increase the number of earmarks enough so that the plaudits we hear from earmark recipients will drown out the voices of taxpayers all over the country who have had enough"
No comments:
Post a Comment