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Emergency Supplemental to be Pared Down:
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The two Appropriations Chairs, [sw: Jerry Lewis] (R-CA) and [sw: Thad Cochran] (R-MS), are meeting to get the emergency supplemental to the President and have agreed to pare down the Senate’s earmarks to make the bill fit Bush’s $92.2 billion maximum demand. That’s good news, although reading the Associated Press article makes you think that they’re cutting A LOT more money out than is actually being cut:
An additional $648 billion obtained by Sen. [sw: Robert Byrd], D-W.Va., to beef up security at U.S. ports is to be dropped, while $1.2 billion in aid for the Gulf Coast fishing and seafood industry obtained by Sen. [sw: Richard Shelby], R-Ala., will be sharply scaled back.
I think they meant to say “million”.
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Railroad to Nowhere Axed:
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GOP In-Fighting Over Earmark Reforms:
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The Associated Press is reporting that the House Republicans have not been able to come to an agreement on the earmark reform provisions in the lobbying and ethics “reform” bill (if you want to know why I use quotations marks go here). In one corner is Appropriations Chair Jerry Lewis (R-CA) who is peeved that the earmark reform only targets earmarks originating out of his committee. Lewis declared that a reform that “does not touch on the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ is not really reform.” In the other corner is Mike Pence (R-IN), the spokesman for the most conservative Republicans. He said to CongressDailyPM that Lewis’ argument against limiting earmark reform to the Appropriations Committee alone “feels to many of us like an effort to defeat earmark reform.” Caught in the middle is Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) who is “confident” the bill will be “on the floor tomorrow” despite Republicans having “some work to do on earmark reform”.
In the Senate Tom Coburn (R-OK) is planning to offer amendments to the emergency spending bill directly targeting spending that he wants to cut, including the Gulf Coast railroad sought by Trent Lott, Thad Cochran, and Haley Barbour. (CongressDailyPM)
Posted: April 26th, 2006 Tags: Earmark Reform, Earmarks, John Boehner, Mike Pence, Thad Cochran, Tom Coburn, Trent Lott -
Against Pork Before They Were For It:
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Ed Fuelner writing in the Chicago Sun-Times reminds us that Senators Trent Lott (R-MS) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) were against pork before they were for it:
Back in 1993, Lott and Cochran helped defeat President Bill Clinton’s ill-advised “stimulus” package, a $16.3 billion pork-barrel measure (ironically, almost the same amount that’s been wastefully added to the current spending bill). “And where are we going to get the money?” Cochran asked Congress then. “We are going to increase the deficit, which requires the government to borrow more money and to pay more interest. That is not economically healthy, that is economically dangerous.”
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RISDY Damaged in Hurricane Katrina?
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Why is the Rhode Island School of Design getting federal dollars from an emergency spending bill aimed at repairing damage in the Hurricane Katrina ravaged Gulf Coast? The Washington Times looks at the issue:
A supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq and hurricane recovery passed the House of Representatives last month calling for $92 billion in federal spending.
The Senate added $14 billion for hurricane relief, and another $10 billion in unrelated spending in amendments to be debated when Congress returns this week. Because of the differences in the two spending packages, the bill then will go to a conference committee before final votes in both chambers.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) are two lawmakers that are outraged by the unrelated spending. Flake provides his interpretation: “”Unfortunately, too many members of Congress have gotten into the practice of responding to a disaster not by asking ‘What can I do to help?’ but instead asking ‘What’s in it for me?’?”
Meanwhile, Think Progress has the story on one of these unnecessary earmarks added by Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran (R).
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Reoriented Express:
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Today the Washington Post picked up the “Reoriented Express” story that Bill Allison has been covering down the hall at Under the Influence.
Mississippi’s Senators Trent Lott (R) and Thad Cochran (R) inserted an earmarked provision to relocate a Gulf Coast railroad that had recently been destroyed and then rebuilt further north to make way for a highway. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who doesn’t mind knocking heads with members of his own party, is in his typical state of outrage at government waste, “It is ludicrous for the Senate to spend $700 million to destroy and relocate a rail line that is in perfect working order, particularly when it recently underwent a $250 million repair … American taxpayers are generous and are happy to restore damaged property, but it is wrong for senators to turn this tragedy into a giveaway for economic developers.”
As always you can find out why the railroad is being relocated if you just follow the money. As the Post notes:
For more than half a dozen years, Mississippi officials, development planners and tourism authorities have dreamed of the complex restructuring of Mississippi’s coastal transportation system that Lott and Cochran now want to set in motion. Under the plan, the CSX line — which runs a few blocks off the coast line — would be scrapped. CSX would move its freight traffic to existing tracks to the north owned by rival Norfolk Southern.
Then U.S. 90, a wide federal highway that hugs Mississippi’s beaches, would be rebuilt along the CSX rail bed. The route of the federal thoroughfare would be turned into a smaller, manicured “beach boulevard” through cities such as Biloxi, where visitors could “spend more time strolling among the casinos and taking in the views,” as the Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal put it.
Allison has even more details from the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study produced just before Hurricane Katrina devastated the coast line:
But the Tri-State Economic and Transportation Benefits Study calls for a project that’s bigger than just moving CSX’s seaside tracks north; it would create an additional north-south rail corridor, parallel CSX tracks that wouldn’t be replaced, replace some line currently operated by the Canadian Northern Illinois Central railroad, and generally be much more ambitious in scale than the original effort to move some CSX tracks further north.
The Study goes onto to detail the other beneficiaries of the railroad relocation/highway construction. Go to Under the Influence to check it out.
