For a long time, transportation spending has been a matter of bi-partisan agreement—both parties saw it as a way to bring home the bacon. But the smooth road that transportation bills normally enjoy is starting to see some potholes. Yesterday, the New York Times wrote up how a Republican transportation spending bill in the House [...]
What did you expect when you gave control of huge piles of money to a small number of people, and you made it your practice to stop in and check on them just once every two years? A pair of news items in the Washington Post last week illustrate what might be called “the corruption [...]
Evidently, a government shutdown is not going to happen—not for a couple of weeks anyway. According to the latest reports, House and Senate leaders have agreed to pass a temporary spending measure that funds the government from this Friday (when the current “continuing resolution” expires) through March 18th. It includes cuts of about $4 billion [...]
In his “State of the Union” speech last week, President Obama was clear about one thing: he’s not letting any earmarks through. He said: [I]f a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it. That statement seems clear enough, but late that same evening the White House may have backed away [...]
With an eventful year drawing to a close, we thought we’d look back on 2010 in the WashingtonWatch.com blog. Many things happened in the world of public policy and politics. We focused on some of them… Our first post of 2010 dealt with one of the nation’s most pressing issues: the Tiger Woods scandal. The [...]
Just weeks after Republican senators swore earmarks off, the Senate is moving a spending bill larded with earmarks. Reports the Washington Post: The $1.2 trillion bill, released on Tuesday, includes more than 6,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion, an amount that many lawmakers decried as an irresponsible binge following a midterm election in which many voters [...]
Today, we roll out a database of earmark requests for 2011 along with our partners in data collection, Taxpayers for Common Sense and Taxpayers Against Earmarks. Recall that, last year, WashingtonWatch.com users crowd-sourced the first-ever earmark request database. With that shining example out there, in January President Obama called for a state-of-the-art earmark database, obviously [...]
Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) doesn’t seem to know what transparency is. This morning the full Senate voted down a proposed rule that would have barred earmarks for the next two years. Part of the reason? Earmarks are transparent. Here’s Senator Durbin, quoted in a Hill article: “There is full disclosure in my office of every [...]
With Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announcing that he will support an earmark moratorium today, it’s almost certain that the Senate Republican Conference will forswear earmarks by vote tomorrow. So what happens now? Politically, interesting things happen. The House, which will be controlled by the Republicans, will also not do earmarks in the 112th [...]
The American League of Lobbyists has provided a slapstick moment in the debate over earmarks. As we noted last week, the Senate Republican Conference—that’s all the folks on the “R” team in the Senate—will vote Tuesday on whether to forgo earmarks in the coming 112th Congress. So the head of the American League of Lobbyists [...]