Sometimes you simply have to wonder what the hell politicians are thinking.
In tiny Bishop, California, five hours north of Los Angeles, Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California, wants to build a museum honoring the mule.
McKeon has requested a $50,000 earmark to explore the possibility of building a museum in the town that every Memorial Day weekend holds the biggest mule celebration in the United States.
That's not $50k for the museum, that's $50k to EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITY of a museum.
And Republicans wonder why they are getting their asses kicked when it comes to fiscal responsibility.
New roads? Better schools? I'm all for earmarks like that, but this is $50,000, someone's yearly salary, to simply take a peek to see if a mule museum is feasible. What do we as taxpayers get for that $50k?
And the requests aren't limited to one party. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, often called the "King of Pork" by critics, has asked for $150,000 to restore the W.A. Young and Sons Foundry to a "key historic property," according to the description posted on Murtha's Web site.
Both McKeon and Murtha refused to talk to CNN about their earmark requests.
No surprise there.
Earlier this year CNN asked House members to disclose their earmarks. Of the more than 430 members, only 47 provided earmark requests, 68 said they would not release their requests and six said they had not made any requests. The others did not return CNN's request for a list of their earmarks.
So, politicians don't want to be publicly accountable for their earmarks, but want to hold Bush's feet to the fire over his accountability? It's called hypocrisy, regardless of political party and it needs to stop now.
Earmarks have been a political hot button for years. Commonly derided as "pork," pet projects are tucked into spending bills. In 2006, Congress approved a record $29 billion in earmarks.
$29 billion in earmarks. That's almost as much as Democrats were complaining they needed for insuring 10 million children under the SCHIP program.
So in other words, they want to have their cake and eat it too. If you want something, you have to pay for it. If you can't afford both, then you need to pick one. The Democratically controlled Congress picked their earmarks over the SCHIP program and they now have to live with that decision, even if it means pissed off voters.
Personally, I would LOVE to have a nice Acura NSX-T. I've worked hard all my life and made sure to be a good provider to my family. I could go into extreme debt over it and get one, but it makes no sense to me to spend that kind of money PLUS interest to get something I want now.
Now, I could get myself out of debt and then go for the Acura, but I need to do the debt first. Congress is acting like a spoiled 20-something with an unlimited credit card.
People are rightfully pissed about the federal debt and yet, Democrats complain about Bush vetoing a program that would have added billions of dollars a year to the debt.
McKeon's and Murtha's requests come at a time when Rep. John Boehner, the Republican minority leader, is trying to force reforms in how Congressional members ask for and receive funding for pet projects.
Boehner, of Ohio, is gathering signatures in hopes of forcing a vote to make public every earmark in every bill. Boehner says it would be unreasonable to force a vote on each of the 16,000 expected earmarks Congress will approve in this year's spending bills. But he says some amount of exposure will cut down on the more outrageous requests.
Boehner tries to lead by example. He has never asked for a single earmark. And he recently wrote an editorial urging his fellow Republicans to return to their fiscally conservative roots and stop asking for so many pork-barrel projects.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. If people are asking for 16,000 earmarks, then Congress should vote on every one. That way the more frivolous ones would get tossed in a hurry. It's not a matter of "we need these 16,000 earmarks", it's "we don't want to waste our time on voting for each one".
That says something significant. They don't readily care about the financial situation of the US. They don't want to actually do their job. They certainly don't want to be publicly ashamed into showing what kind of idiotic earmarks that they are asking for. And if Boehner can get by without asking for earmarks, there's no reason why Murtha can't either.
Travis
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