Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is going to be offering 12 amendments to the Agriculture Appropriations bill on the House floor later this evening, which we are proudly anticipating (scroll down the blog to see our Key Vote Alert and our press release).
Flake's amendments are designed to strip the bill of a lot of wasteful pork. Kristina Rasmussen of NTU has a full list of the 12 projects that the amendments are targeting, but here's a good sampling:
National Grape and Wine Initiative (Davis, CA) $100,000 above FY06 enacted
This program is to support and enhance the public health through improved understanding of the nutritional benefits to be derived from grapes and grape products.
These amendments are going to eat up a lot of time. That's what is so exciting about this. Go-along-to-get-along politicians don't like the idea of defending their pork projects on the House floor when they are usually passed into law without objection. Since these amendments will make these big spenders annoyed and grouchy, I'm sure we're going to see a lively verbal exchange on the House floor.
If you want to watch the proceedings, you can tune into C-SPAN, but we still don't know when he'll be on the floor. We just know it's going to be sometime tonight.
Also, I met with Congressman Flake earlier today with several other bloggers to talk about the amendments. The bloggers who were in attendance and who wrote about it are the folks at the Heritage Policy Blog, Dave Holman of American Spectator, and Mary Katharine Ham of HughHewitt.com.
Finally, below the fold is the pre-released floor speech that Flake plans to give. Reading it will remind you of the fact that he's one of the biggest defenders of the American taxpayers in the House right now. He was also one of the first candidates elected with the help of Club members back in 2000. After almost 6 years in Washington, Flake not only is showing no symptoms of big-spending "Potomac Fever", but he may actually be getting more fiscally stringent...if that's even possible.
What a rare thing in this town. We wish him good luck tonight.
Congressman Flake Attempts to Shed Light on Earmark Process
Flake to Offer Amendments to Agriculture Appropriations Bill to Eliminate Earmarks
Washington, D.C. -- Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona's Sixth District, today will deliver the following statement on the House floor regarding his amendments to effectively eliminate earmarks in the Agriculture Appropriations bill:
“Mr. Speaker, today we will engage in a debate that has been a long time in coming. I plan to offer several amendments to this bill to block funding for a series of Member earmarks that are contained in the committee report that accompanies this bill.
“Let me point out that the House has already voted, in the lobby reform bill a few weeks ago, to require that Members attach their names to their earmarks. Yet this committee report has come to the floor with more than 400 earmarks, and no names.
“Let me state from the outset that I am under no illusion that I can succeed in blocking funding for any of these earmarks we will discuss. I am well acquainted with the process of logrolling, where one Member agrees to support another Member’s earmark if that Member will agree to do the same. I suspect that logrolling will prevail here today.
“But it is about time that we provide a little window into the process. Is it the federal government’s responsibility to recruit dairy families from other regions to move to Northeast Iowa, as one of the earmarks we will discuss today purports to do? Is the need so great this year to fund the National Grape and Wine Initiative that we should add $100,000 to the debt owed by future generations? Since our responsibility as Members of Congress is to prioritize limited resources, do we really want to tell taxpayers that we believe that spending $180,000 on Hydroponic Tomato Production is more pressing than other issues?
“I expect that a few of the amendments I will offer today will be successfully blocked with a point of order. The reason: We have no documentation that the federal agency that will fund the project knows anything about the project that is being funded. To successfully challenge the earmark requires an assumption that the agency is familiar with the project, otherwise we are legislating on an appropriation bill – a violation of our rules. The incentive, therefore, for Members looking to protect their earmarks is to be either vague or silent about the project’s goals and its oversight.
“Let’s think about that for a minute. How are we supposed to exercise oversight of these earmarked projects? Who is to be held accountable? Not the government agency. By upholding the point of order we are stipulating that the agency might as well not even know the project exists.
“In the end, since rank-and-file Members can’t even challenge these earmarks without being subject to a point of order, and the agencies don’t know anything about them, and since we don’t even know who requested the earmark in the first place, the only individuals who have any oversight function are selected Members and staff of the Appropriations Committee.
“Mr. Speaker, it does not speak well for us as legislators when the first and last documentation of these earmarks is found in Members’ press releases. I’d like to think we can do better than that. I think that all of us who were elected to this august body had higher aspirations than to grovel for the crumbs that fall from appropriator’s tables.
“We need to return to the process of authorization, appropriation and oversight. That is what this branch of government is supposed to do. We diminish ourselves and our office when we stray from this course.”
