Tuesday, March 25, 2008

That Upstart Patrick Murphy's At It Again!

(Tongue in cheek, I assure you…)

I think the editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times must require another case of Geritol or something, because they’ve been particularly crotchety lately.

This morning, they chided Patrick Murphy for “keeping quiet” about earmark requests, as follows (from here)…

Talk of earmark reform (as long as it involves other congressional districts) plays well with the voters, which is why both Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-8, and Rep. Allyson Schwartz, D-13, Democratic colleagues, support the idea. But there's a big difference: Schwartz says she will release the list of organizations for which she has requested funding. Murphy, on the other hand, does not plan to announce his 2009 earmark requests until after he knows which ones pass muster in the congressional review process. His spokesman said the congressman does not want to cast a negative reflection on a local organization or company by publicizing a funding request only to have it denied later.

Even if we give that explanation some credence, it still contributes to the secrecy of the whole earmark process, and it's that secrecy as much as anything else that prompts so much criticism and the feeling that earmarks are a way that lawmakers buy votes.
OK, then, let me run this by you; suppose Patrick attempts to procure $30 million in earmarks for the Bucks County Free Library and he makes that announcement before the money has been approved. Subsequent to that, let’s say that only $15 million is approved or the request is denied altogether.

Congratulations! You’ve just given Tom Manion and the Repugs all they need to run an attack ad months later after everyone has forgotten the details about this (I can just hear the hushed, worrisome-sounding narration now: “The Bucks County Free Library was counting on Patrick Murphy to fund their new program to keep predators from invading the chat rooms where our kids go online to communicate to each other…and he failed. Why does Patrick Murphy hate our kids??!!).

Besides, the last time the issue of earmarks came up, I would say Patrick did pretty well by his district (here – the editorial alludes to this below).

Murphy is in a particularly dicey position here. He has publicly staked out his position as a deficit hawk and told our editorial board in a more intimate gathering that the federal government has to reduce its spending. Yet, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent watchdog group, Murphy secured $30 million in earmarks for the 8th District last year, the fourth highest among Pennsylvania's 19 members of Congress. And now he plans to keep quiet about the next round of earmark requests. In addition, the way lawmakers determine where the money goes is more than a little cloudy. Nobody knows how much influence lobbyists have, and what kind of quid pro quo is involved.
I think a bit of perspective is in order here; this notes that “there were 15,832 earmarks totaling $71 billion in 2006. (In 1994, there were 4,155 earmarks totaling $29 billion.),” and this notes that “the 2007 spending bills contained about 25 percent fewer earmarks than the 2006 appropriations.”

So what does the Courier Times suggest instead?

...Move the whole system of earmarks out from under Congressional whim. Those needing public funding should apply for it not though people in Congress but through the federal Office of Management and Budget where such requests would face merit-based evaluation and competitive allocation.

Only then will this tawdry record of congressional favoritism end.
Click this link and tell me the reason why this is a bad idea.

Does the Courier Times seriously mean to suggest that the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Milhous Bush could do a better job of funding district appropriations than Patrick and the Democratic Congress? Especially when OMB is run by Jim Nussle, about whom the following was written (here)…

Half the time he was Budget Committee chairman, Nussle couldn’t even pass a budget -and he played a key role in approving the president’s policies that ran up the debt, mostly to pay for tax cuts for the very wealthy. With Nussle at the helm of OMB, Bush’s fiscal policy loses even more credibility.
And it should also be noted that fellow Senate Repug Charles Grassley (as stated here) has asked Nussle to close a loophole “quietly slipped last year into a proposed Bush administration rule, (that) would allow companies performing government work overseas to avoid having to report contract abuse. Contract fraud has cost the government $14 million (€9.2 million) in bribes alone out of at least $102 billion (€67.25 billion) spent in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.” No word on whether or not Nussle or his boss intends to comply with Grassley’s request.

Oh yes, Courier Times editorial board, I definitely trust Bushco to look out for our interests as opposed to Patrick.

On second thought, I think you guys need something more than a case of Geritol. Maybe one of you could stop by Staples before you get to the grocery store and pick up a calculator also.

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