Donald Lambro on the "clueless Congress," the ever-expanding earmark system, and Mrs. Clinton's joyous part, despite her rhetoric, in the spending circus.While families were buying stocking stuffers for the kids, the Democratic Congress was stuffing billions of dollars of pork into a grotesquely bloated omnibus appropriations bill.
This column looked into some of the wasteful squandering as the end-of-the-year spending bill was moving through the legislative process. But new details of its scandalous spending practices demand greater attention. A word of warning though, to those who have high blood pressure: read this sitting down...
If one special interest in the country has been left out of these bills, it would be hard think of one. It contains money for everything from New York's Center for Grape Genetics to peanut production in Georgia, from Pennsylvania's Center for Dairy Excellence to the Bronx River Restoration Project.
Keep in mind, these are projects that the administration did not request money for, nor were they recommended or formally evaluated by any of the appropriating committees. These are items that were inserted into spending bills, with the full approval of the majority leadership of Congress, to buy political support in their states and districts to help them win another term in the 2008 elections.
To be sure, earmarking is a bipartisan affliction. Its abuses occur on both sides of the aisle. Nevertheless, powerful Democrats in Congress control the legislative machinery and they are among its chief abusers.
And don't look for any substantive change from the Democrats who are running for president. Since her election to the Senate, Hillary Clinton has been responsible for more than half a billion dollars in earmarks that went to 59 corporations, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation. Nearly two-thirds of these firms donated money to her campaigns through their executives, board members or their lobbyists.
In a classic case of mutual back-scratchery, her campaigns have raked in more than $1 million from beneficiaries of her earmarks. Clinton has delivered more than $2.3 billion in earmarked pork to her state since 2001. She's not the biggest abuser of pork, though she "does significantly more earmarking than most others," the Times discovered.
Among the spending bills that passed this year, she was responsible for 216 earmarked projects totaling $236.6 million. So much for her claim of fiscal responsibility.
Her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination are tucking into the hog meat, too. Barack Obama, promising to change the way things are done in Washington, is responsible for $90.4 million in earmarks...
The rest of this piece is right here.
