When will Obama 'get it' on earmarks?
Examiner Editorial
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March 3, 2009
As the nation faces its most severe recession since 1982, President Barack Obama apparently wants the American people to forget that he promised he would give them earmark reform if they elected him president, even if he had to go “line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.” It’s time for Obama to keep his promise.
However, administration officials - including Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag and White House chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel – have been calling the earmark-laden spending bill needed to keep the federal government operating through September “last year’s business.” Only in Washington can a spending bill that requires the president’s signature today be yesterday’s business. Although the $410 billion bill contains nearly 8,600 earmarks totaling $7.7 billion, White House officials say President Obama will sign it anyway. Americans, Orszag says, should just “move on.”
But embattled taxpayers will not soon forget this latest illustration of Washington double-talk. Even Time Magazine, whose coverage of Obama’s campaign verged on rapturous, finally had to ask: “Does Obama have a double standard on earmarks?” The fact that the president bragged to a televised joint session of Congress that there were no earmarks in his $787 billion stimulus package, only to remain silent as House Democrats passed a bill with nearly 9,000 earmarks the very next day, answers Time’s question in the affirmative.
Because earmarks bypass the regular legislative process that forces projects to compete for the same dollars, most earmarks tend to be pure political pork. So earmarks in the current spending bill are just as likely to be wasteful as they were when Republicans were busy funding the “Bridge to Nowhere.” For example, there’s $1.8 million to manage swine manure in Iowa, $190,000 for a “Buffalo Bill Historical Center” in Wyoming, $2.2 million to study grape genetics in New York, $175,000 for “façade improvements” on a dilapidated theater in Pennsylvania, $162,000 for cricket control in Utah, and a total of $41.5 million for the presidential libraries of three former Democratic presidents: FDR, JFK and Lyndon Johnson. Taxpayers will be billed for all of it.
No wonder less than two months into the new administration, thousands of angry Americans have already participated in Tea Party protests all around the country. Obama said last week that he “gets it” on executive pay caps. It’s time he gets it on earmarks, too, and veto this ridiculously wasteful omnibus pork bill.
