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Politics

House Democrats to suppress 'oink' of pork despite pledge

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 4, 2007

WASHINGTON - After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress' pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify "earmarks" - lawmakers' requests for specific projects and contracts for their states - in documents that accompany spending bills.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., says those requests for dams, community grants and research contracts for favored universities or hospitals will be added to spending measures in the fall. That is when House and Senate negotiators assemble final bills to send to President Bush.

As a result, most lawmakers will not get a chance to oppose specific projects as wasteful or questionable when the spending bills for various agencies get their first votes in the full House in June.

Obey insists he is reluctantly taking the step because Appropriations Committee members and staff have not had enough time to fully review the 36, 000 earmark requests that have flooded the committee.

The committee has been absorbed with writing a catchall spending bill cleaning up unfinished budget business from last year and the just-completed Iraq war spending bill.

"It's going to take weeks to get that screening done, and I'm the person that has to sign off, " Obey told his colleagues at a committee meeting just before Memorial Day. "As long as I'm in charge, I'm going to make doggone sure that we do everything possible to screen every project."

Budget watchdog groups who "scrub" appropriations bills for questionable provisions are outraged. "Who appointed him judge and jury of earmarks?" asked Tom Schatz, president of the Citizens Against Government Waste. "What that does is leave out the public's input."

What Obey is doing runs counter to new rules that Democrats promised would make such spending decisions more open. Those rules made it clear that projects earmarked for federal dollars and their sponsors were to be made available to public scrutiny when appropriations bills are debated.

Obey says Democrats will follow the new rules when earmarks are added to the bills, which in most cases will not be until House-Senate talks in September.

Republicans say Democrats are skirting the new disclosure rules.

"This is not more sunlight. This is actually keeping earmarks secret until it's too late to do anything about it, " griped Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

[Last modified June 4, 2007, 01:58:09]