posted on June 14, 2007 08:05:11 PM
While pelosi is trying to soak the taxpayers for MORE 'freebies' like allowing all her adult family members to fly anywhere, at OUR expense....the rest of her sad group of hypocrites are doing exactly what they used against the republicans to win voter approval. Can't even come up with an excuse of their own. They have to copy cat what the republicans said against them.
No wonder the polls are showing their congress hitting even NEW LOWS. They're failing to live up to their promises. And the voters ARE noticing that fact.
They don't let the voters vote....and now they're certainly NOT going to allow them to see where all our tax dollars they continue wasting are going. Ones they PROMISED to put out there so voters could see who is spending what on whom. lol
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House grinds to a halt in rift over earmarks
Republicans stall Homeland Security spending bill
Edward Epstein, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Thursday, June 14, 2007
(06-14) 04:00 PDT Washington --
For the second straight day, minority House Republicans ground the House to a standstill Wednesday as they drove home their objections to a Democratic plan to deny a floor vote on lawmakers' thousands of pet projects.
Public anger over the surging number of special member projects called earmarks -- derided as pork barrel spending -- was a factor in the Republicans' loss of House control last November, GOP members concede, and now they say they've gotten religion on the need for openness in government.
Charges of hypocrisy flew in floor speeches as House leaders huddled behind closed doors to seek a way out of a dispute that Republicans said showed Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi had backed down on promises of openness and disclosure made when they took power last January.
Democrats had hoped this week to pass four of the 12 annual bills that pay for federal operations beginning Oct. 1. Instead, Republicans have offered 116 amendments to a $37.4 billion Homeland Security spending bill -- the first of the bills on the floor -- in a bid to stall it. And on Tuesday they offered repeated motions to adjourn the House, each requiring a vote, keeping a wary House in session until 2:10 a.m. Wednesday.
Democrats argued Republicans were engaging in partisan attacks to try to embarrass Pelosi. They charged the GOP lawmakers lacked credibility on earmarks, the number of which exploded during their 12 years of House rule.
But Republicans cried foul over a plan by Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., for the House to pass all of the dozen spending bills without any earmarks.
Obey said House members from both parties -- even while expressing concern about rising government spending -- had inundated his committee with 33,000 earmark requests. He said it would take the committee's staff four weeks to study all those pork barrel requests and pare them to a manageable level.
Obey proposed to put the earmarks into the bill as the House prepares to confer with the Senate to reconcile the two chambers' different versions of the spending bills. Obey promised to disclose the list of the earmarks a month before such a conference, which Democrats hope to hold by late summer, so members and the public will have time to scrutinize and react to the projects.
But once the House-Senate conferees agree on a final bill, the rules of the House and Senate bar members from amending the legislation to remove individual items. That means, the Republicans charge, that Obey alone will decide on billions of dollars of federal spending affecting projects in practically every House district.
"The Obey policy is indefensible ... Obey's slush fund is indefensible," Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., said as the House debated the Homeland Security spending bill, which provides a 6 percent increase over President Bush's request and would be 13 percent more than was spent last year.
"The new majority ran on a policy of openness, honesty and candor, and I suggest this is a policy that hardly promotes openness, honesty or candor," said Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga.
When Democrats took over the House last January, they passed rules saying that members behind all earmarks had to be identified, and that earmarks on all spending bills would be identified "before members are asked to vote on them," as Rules Committee Chairwoman Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., told the House.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, an outside watchdog group, said earmarks must be disclosed early in the process.
"Taxpayers have the fundamental right to know about all earmarks. Both congressional and administration projects should be disclosed in legislation before the full House casts a single vote," the group's president, Ryan Alexander, said in a statement.
Obey said that since he became chairman in January when Democrats formally took back House control, his committee has been swamped, in part because Republicans last year failed to complete the appropriations process.
That meant Congress had to spend last January finishing up that work, in which the thousands of earmarks the old Republican Congress had sought were killed for this fiscal year. He also said his work was hampered because Republicans had removed many of the committee's staff before ceding control. And then he had to deal with the long fight with Bush over Iraq war funding.
In 2005, according to the White House budget office, under Republican control of Congress there were 13,492 earmarks in appropriations bills totaling almost $19 billion.
"Our Republican friends are desperately looking for anything to squawk about because they haven't been able to find anything substantive to complain about," Obey said.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., heaped scorn on the Republicans. "What's funny is that many of the Republicans who are fighting for the right to vote against earmarks ... never met an earmark they didn't like," he said.
Even before the Republicans dug in their heels, the House faced a daunting timetable. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said he would keep the House in session into Saturday to pass the first four spending bills and send them to the Senate. That timetable is now in tatters.
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This article appeared on page A - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle
posted on June 14, 2007 08:30:40 PM
And from a LESS liberal news source:
House GOP Promotes Earmark Openness
Jun 14, 8:19 PM (ET)
By ANDREW TAYLOR
WASHINGTON (AP) - House Republicans who larded legislation with lawmakers' pet projects when they ran the House have successfully forced Democrats to be more open about Congress' pork barrel ways.
The changes may not have much impact on the government's bottom line. But the hope is that greater sunlight on earmarks will clean bills of the most wasteful of those home district projects.
House GOP leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and about a dozen other Republicans promoted their victory at a news conference even as Democrats said final details still were under discussion.
After two days of bickering, it was clear that Democrats would abandon plans to pass spending bills without allowing foes of earmarks to challenge them in the full House.
Those opponents are now preparing for a long summer campaign to scrutinize spending bills for wasteful earmarks. Each bill will have a list of earmarks and their sponsors; self-appointed overseers promise to pore over supporting documents to weed out the worst pet projects.
"All that will be out in the public," Boehner said. "That in and of itself will go a long way in reducing the number of earmarks that don't pass the straight-face test."
The GOP victory will not have a substantive effect on the budget or do much to quell lawmakers' efforts to seek public money for specific projects back home.
Efforts to kill earmarks in the full House invariably prove unsuccessful. Lawmakers do not want to irritate powerful spending barons and put their own earmarks at risk. Also, those who offer such amendments tend to be unpopular.
"I get beat like a rented mule," says Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who offers amendments to kill earmarks but never has won a vote, despite taking on earmarks he feels are difficult to justify such as a hydroponic tomato project in Ohio and city pool renovations in Banning, Calif.
In fact, the greater impact will come from the Democrats' promise to cut earmarks in half. That is in additional to a one-year freeze on most earmarks imposed by Democrats this year when wrapping up the last budget year's unfinished business.
Republicans this week stalled a homeland security funding bill in protest over a decision by Democrats to skirt House rules aimed at permitting open debates on earmarks.
The House Appropriations Committee chairman, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., had announced that pet projects would not be added to most spending bills before initial debate in the full House. Instead, they were to be added in House-Senate compromise bills this fall when it would be too late to challenge them.
Obey's move caused an uproar that Democrats did not seem to take seriously until it threatened to stall their appropriations agenda and attracted harsh media coverage.
The battle in the House focused on the idea that greater openness about earmarks would help curb lawmakers' excesses.
But the great explosion in earmarking during GOP control of Congress has its roots in efforts by GOP leaders to spread around the favored projects instead of awarding them mostly to senior lawmakers and members of the Appropriations Committee.
The committee is swamped with 32,000 requests. Obey gripes that many House members care more about their earmarks than they do about important policy decisions.
I hate earmarks because they suck everybody in ... into the idea that we have to be ATM machines for our districts," Obey said. "It is a whole lot more important to know whether we have adequately funded education ... than it is to know whether a member got a $200,000 earmark for an afterschool center."
Earmarks are a small part of federal spending but "have been a large portion of the culture of spending," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas. "And for a party to run on transparency and accountability in earmarks and to do a complete about face once they took power could not be tolerated."
In 2005, according to the White House budget office, there were 13,492 earmarks in appropriations bills totaling almost $19 billion. Obey has declined to accept President Bush's estimates as a starting point for determining how many earmarks to include in this year's round of spending bills.
The decision to curb earmarks, enthusiastically embraced by Bush, has lawmakers scrambling to make sure they get their share.
Republicans seeking earmarks will feel a disproportionate squeeze because under long-standing tradition the minority party receives about 40 percent of earmarks.
With final agreement on the House earmark process remaining elusive, Democratic leaders declined to restart debate on a $37.4 billion homeland security measure.
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