WASHINGTON — During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.
"We need earmark reform," Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. "And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely."
The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.
Democrats declared the bill earmark-free. Republicans disagreed.
"While this bill does not include traditional earmarks, we should all understand that there are earmarks in this bill," said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo. "There is $850 million ... to bail out Amtrak, a $75 million earmark for the Smithsonian, a $1 billion earmark for the 2010 census."
Democrats have been trying to revamp the earmark process for about two years. In 2007, they instituted a system that required members to explain the contents of each earmark, as well as a justification for why it was included in the legislation that way. They claimed this led to a reduction in earmarks by as much as 43 percent.
But critics contended the system still had problems. Simply making information more available, they said, didn't address the major criticism: That such projects should go through the regular legislative process, subject to detailed hearings and bipartisan votes.
No comments:
Post a Comment