By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer
June 3, 2007
WASHINGTON - After promising unprecedented openness regarding
Congress' pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving
in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for
the upcoming budget year.
Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day
in power in January to clearly identify "earmarks" lawmakers'
requests for specific projects and contracts for their states — in
documents that accompany spending bills.
Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts
in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following
an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to
keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for
critics to effectively challenge them.
Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., says those requests for dams, community
grants and research contracts for favored universities or hospitals
will be added spending measures in the fall. That is when House
and Senate negotiators assemble final bills to send to President
Bush.
Such requests total billions of dollars.
As a result, most lawmakers will not get a chance to oppose
specific projects as wasteful or questionable when the spending
bills for various agencies get their first votes in the full
House in June.
The House-Senate compromise bills due for final action in
September cannot be amended and are subject to only one hour
of debate, precluding challenges to individual projects.
Obey insists he is reluctantly taking the step because Appropriations
Committee members and staff have not had enough time to fully
review the 36,000 earmark requests that have flooded the committee.
The committee has been absorbed with writing a catchall spending
bill cleaning up unfinished budget business from last year
and the just-completed Iraq war spending bill.
"It's going to take weeks to get that screening done
and I'm the person that has to sign off," Obey told his
colleagues at a committee meeting just before Memorial Day. "As
long as I'm in charge, I'm going to make doggone sure that
we do everything possible to screen every project."
Obey also says many lawmakers requested additional time to
get their official requests for back-home projects submitted
for review.
Budget watchdog groups who "scrub" appropriations
bills for questionable provisions are outraged.
"Who appointed him judge and jury of earmarks?" Tom
Schatz, president of the Citizens Against Government Waste. "What
that does is leave out the public's input."
What Obey is doing runs counter to new rules that Democrats
promised would make such spending decisions more open. Those
rules made it clear that projects earmarked for federal dollars
and their sponsors were to be made available to public scrutiny
when appropriations bills are debated.
The rules also require lawmakers requesting such projects
to provide a written explanation describing their requests
and a letter certifying that they or their spouse would not
make any financial gain from them.
The greater transparency was supposed to lead to more self-discipline
on the part of lawmakers. While the great majority of home-state
projects are easy to defend, there are often clunkers. For
example, the "bridge to nowhere," a $223 million
span in Alaska to link Ketchikan and Gravina Island, which
has a population of about 50.
Ultimately, after the bridge was widely mocked in news account,
Congress decided to dump it.
Obey has promised to cut congressional earmarks which the
White House says totaled almost $19 billion in 2005 in half.
Democrats, he says, will follow the new rules when earmarks
are added to the bills, which in most cases will not be until
House-Senate talks in September.
Republicans say Democrats are skirting the new disclosure
rules. Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, the Appropriations Committee's
former chairman and now its top Republican, said Obey's move
represents "a complete lack of transparency."
Conservatives say they will employ guerrilla tactics during
debates in the full House to push their point.
"This is not more sunlight. This is actually keeping
earmarks secret until it's too late to do anything about it," griped
Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. "It will be impossible for anybody
to challenge any of what will be thousands and thousands and
thousands of earmarks."
Some Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are threatening to block
appropriations bills from going to House-Senate conference
talks if that is when lawmakers' projects are going to be added.
Democrats in the Senate including Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va.,
who heads the Senate Appropriations Committee also are unhappy
about Obey's move. Many do not like the prospect of waiting
until September or October to learn which hometown projects
they will get.
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