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Obey’s Earmark Scheme Defeated For Now

J.J. Jackson* | June 25, 2007 

From Citizens Against Government Waste:

Taxpayers enjoyed a major victory in the fight for earmark transparency on Friday when a wave of protest from CAGW, other good-government groups, and our online activists forced House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) to back down from his plan not to make earmarks available for public scrutiny in the fiscal 2008 appropriations bills.Rep. Obey’s plan would have taken away any opportunity for members of the House to debate and vote on an earmark’s merits on the House floor - gutting new earmark disclosure rules enacted in January. Instead, Rep. Obey and his staff intended to vet the more than 30,000 earmark requests his committee received themselves to determine their suitability for funding, making them “judge and jury” for billions of dollars in pet projects. While Rep. Obey promised the approved earmarks would be made available for viewing in August, they would be included in un-amendable House-Senate conference reports, leaving no opportunity to challenge any individual pork project.

Rep. Obey’s plan would have kept taxpayers in the dark about tens of billions of dollars in congressionally earmarked spending items until it was too late to get rid of them. In short, the Appropriations chairman sought to institute an even more secretive process for vetting earmarks than existed before the elections!

Thanks to the help of CAGW members like you and a groundswell of outrage from across the political spectrum, House Democratic leaders finally agreed to list earmarks in the fiscal 2008 appropriations bills, where they will be subject to scrutiny, debate, and amendment.

Sincerely,

Thomas A. Schatz

President

Contributor's website: http://www.libertyreborn.com




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