Rep. John Murtha is hosting a gala dinner tonight at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City for defense industry lobbyists who have received and who hope to receive millions of tax dollars via earmarks sponsored by the Pennsylvania Democrat.
Murtha is one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s closest allies and one of the leading earmarkers in Congress. Tickets for the “Evening with Jack and Joyce Murtha” dinner cost $1,500 per person. Murtha and cohorts like Rep. James Moran, D-Va., and Rep. Peter Visclosky, D-Ind., have refined the earmark-for-a-contribution process to a fine art. A Roll Call investigation last year found, with assistance from Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Sunlight Foundation, that the three Democrats funneled millions of dollars in earmarks for firms whose executives then contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their re-election campaigns.
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But Murtha’s porkfest is not going unnoticed. Three conservative citizen activist groups and a conservative blog that are active in the anti-earmark Porkbusters movement are gathering protesters, posters and pigs and plan to crash the Murtha pork bash.
RedState.com is the blog that put out the original call for protests. The responding groups are Americans for Prosperity, Citizens Against Government Waste and the National Taxpayers Union.
The protesters are meeting at 5:30 p.m. at the top of the Pentagon City Metrorail station outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at 1250 South Hayes St. in Arlington. Organizers say photographs of attendees will be taken and posted on the Internet.
Public disgust with such blatant congressional corruption is growing and pork-barrel politicos like Murtha and Moran should not be surprised if tonight’s protest is only the first of many more to come until Congress cleans up its act.
Members of the Senate will soon have an opportunity to take a major step in stopping the earmark business, thanks to Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who is offering an amendment to the Senate’s 2009 budget bill requiring a one-year moratorium on all earmarks. “Earmarks are a bipartisan addiction, and the only solution is to go cold turkey. Congress is not going to be able to kick the habit unless it calls a time-out,” DeMint said.
“Giving up earmarks for one year is not too much to ask. Americans have to make these kinds of decisions with their family budgets all the time.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ought to support the DeMint amendment in a bipartisan effort to shut down the congressional favor factory for good.
