Obama, Durbin, Blagojevich, and K Street get biggest earmark in history
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
February 13, 2009
What do you get when you combine impeached former Illinois Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, legendary K Street lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates, Senate appropriator Dick Durbin, D-IL, President Barack Obama, former Democratic House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, and the largest spending bill in the history of the planet?
You get the costliest earmark Washington has ever seen.
Obama proclaims his stimulus bill is earmark-free, but that claim is a bit Clintonian. Turns out, it depends on what the meaning of the word earmark is. What if a provision in the bill doesn’t name one specific project, but is written so narrowly that only one project is eligible?
That’s what Republican critics charge in the case of clean-coal funding in downstate Illinois. The Senate bill included a section dedicating $4.6 billion to “fossil energy research and development,” with a $2 billion line-item “for one or more near zero emissions powerplant(s).”
Sure, that doesn’t name one powerplant, and it leaves open the idea of funding multiple powerplants, but there’s plenty of evidence that this line was intended as—and will function as—an earmark for the FutureGen coal gasification powerplant in Mattoon, Illinois.
“There’s no other plant that would be eligible,” says John Hart, spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK. Durbin’s office, the Mattoon project’s champion, didn’t return calls for comment.
The Mattoon story is typical of Washington in many ways. It involves closed-door dealings, high-powered lobbyists, homestate pork requests, and corporate subsidies in the name of the environment. But it is extraordinary in others: Its size is unprecedented (the Bridge to Nowhere cost less than half-a-billion), and it is a Democratic earmark for coal companies that normally are their environmental nemeses.
The project’s genesis was Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy task force—the one Democrats decried because of coal and oil industry input. One fruit for the coal industry of that 2001 National Energy Policy was FutureGen, described on the Energy Department’s website as “a $1 billion initiative to create a coal-based power plant focused on demonstrating a revolutionary clean coal technology that would produce hydrogen and electricity and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.”
It’s a partnership between a handful of coal companies and the Energy Department, and it’s sited in Mattoon. As the project began to look less promising and the Bush administration considered pulling the plug, then-Gov. Blagojevich hired Cassidy & Associates to preserve funding and—after the DOE withdrew from the project—to restore the federal money.
Blagojevich’s lobbyists on the project included Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s deputy chief of staff, Kai Anderson, and former Illinois Democratic congressman Marty Russo. Illinois paid Cassidy at least $340,000 for its lobbying efforts during 2007 and 2008, and a Cassidy spokesman told this columnist that the firm was still working for FutureGen funding this month.
The FutureGen alliance hired Gephardt to lobby for restored funding. On the Republican side, former top House appropriator Bob Livingston of Louisianais lobbying for Anglo-American PLC, a coal mining partner in FutureGen.
Why did DOE pull out last year? Former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman laid out the reasons this month in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “the project’s estimated cost has almost doubled and innovations in technology and changes in the marketplace have created other viable options for demonstrating carbon capture and storage on a commercial scale.”
Meanwhile, many environmentalists and renewable-fuel advocates rail against the project, arguing there is no such thing as clean coal.
But when Obama, an Illinoisan, was elected president, it gave hope to FutureGen allies. In June last year, Durbin told a local paper: “Obama has signed on to letters of support for [FutureGen]. I am sure if elected he will work hard to make it a reality,”
Coburn drafted an amendment to strip out Mattoon, but Reid made sure that amendment never saw the light of day. When House and Senate Democrats got together in their quasi-conference committee—the one without any Republicans—to draft the final bill, they kept the Mattoon earmark.
The profitable coal companies of FutureGen, buoyed by an army of lobbyists and powerful champions, are the biggest winners of the stimulus.
If you ride the metro in D.C., you may see the signs that equate clean coal to mermaids, Bigfoot, and other imaginary creatures. It seems an earmark-free spending bill is another fable.
Examiner columnist Timothy P. Carney covers power and influence in the nation’s capital.
