A bipartisan majority of the Senate killed an effort Wednesday to strip $100 million out of the “emergency” war spending bill that is set aside for the 2008 presidential conventions.
“You are asking your grandchildren to pay for a party you’re having today,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said moments before the Senate voted 51-45 to keep the spending in the $121 billion spending bill.
Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., defended the money for their home states, saying the money will pay for security in a “post-9/11 world.”
Fiscal conservatives were outraged. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., called the bill laden with nearly $20 billion in “pork” a “national disgrace” and said it is “blood money.”
“Any congressman or senator who wants to sell their votes for a project back home and deny funding for the troops has really let the country down,” he said.
President Bush has said the bill contains so much pork he intends to veto it.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., defended the heavy spending for farmers in the bill.
“It’s not pork,” he said. “It’s in this country’s best interest to help those family farmers.”
Coburn, Graham and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., sent letters to lobbyists for recipients of the pork – including the mayors of Denver and St. Paul – asking them to forgo the cash from Congress.
“Is it really a national emergency critical to winning the war on terror for the cities hosting the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to receive matching $50 million grants as called for in the Senate bill?” they wrote in the letter.
The senators want the pork recipients “to stand up as Americans – not as spinach growers, not as milk producers not as tree farmers – and say this is not the time or the place to hold our troops hostage to some parochial need,” DeMint said.
Coburn, who was a famous thorn in the side of big-spending fellow Republicans when they were in control, called it the “character flaw of Congress.”
“We see it with gambling addicted people,” he said. “You [are] always going to win on the come, except the come is never going to come. What’s going to happen is that we’re going to shackle our grandchildren.”
