Press Room
News Stories
Editorial: Earmarks in Senate deserve special scorn
San Antonio Express-News
October 25, 2007
Some congressional earmarks are tailor-made for derision. The directives for federal spending are so obviously wasteful, so narrowly focused on some obscure interest and so far removed from a legitimate public purpose that you wonder about the motives of the lawmakers who create them.
Among the earmarks members of Congress have tacked onto spending bills in recent years, a few of the more notable recipients of taxpayer money were a teapot museum in North Carolina, a boxing club in Nevada and, of course, the infamous bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
A few members of the Senate obviously felt it was time for some new outrages. Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, both New York Democrats, tacked a $1 million earmark onto the appropriation for the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Labor to build the Museum at Bethel Woods in upstate New York.
The museum will memorialize the 1969 Woodstock music festival. The owner of the property happens to be a major contributor to the Clinton presidential campaign.
Pork-busting Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., forced his colleagues to take a roll call vote on the groovy expenditure. In a fit of conscience, the Senate voted to eliminate the earmark and commit the savings to a block grant for children's health care.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., tried to insert another scandalous earmark that designated $100,000 for the Louisiana Family Forum "to develop a plan to promote better science education."
What is the Louisiana Family Forum? Its Web site says it's an organization committed to defending faith, freedom and the traditional family. Its mission is "to persuasively present biblical principles in the centers of influence."
In July, Vitter publicly apologized for a "very serious sin," presumably related to his phone number showing up on the phone records of the so-called D.C. Madam. So the senator has a clear interest in trying to rehabilitate his image with religious conservatives.
Thirty civil liberties, educational, religious and scientific organizations pointed out that a group that advocates creationism in public schools probably isn't well qualified to design a science curriculum.
Moreover, giving the Louisiana Family Forum federal dollars to pursue its agenda raises all sorts of constitutional red flags. Under withering criticism, Vitter withdrew the earmark.
Fiscal sanity prevailed in these two cases. But like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, thousands of other cases of earmark abuse remain below the surface of public scrutiny.
|
|
