Liz Saville Roberts: “The $365 million for Kansas in BRAC construction funding, there were no earmarks to that, no earmarks. That was…”

“The $365 million for Kansas in BRAC construction funding, there were no earmarks to that, no earmarks. That was requested by the Department of Defense and put in the President's budget for projects that are essential for our men and women in uniform when they come back from Iraq. There were three earmarks in there. They are gone and I understand that. I had one for a childcare center, Todd Tiahrt had one for lighting a ramp on a runway--I don't know what you are going to do if you don't have any lights on a runway when you land--and then there was another vehicle maintenance center at Fort Riley to take all the humvees and vehicles back from the desert and get them fixed up and replenished. They are gone. The rest of it, the $365 million that is at risk in Kansas, goes for projects in regard to BRAC construction. I don't know if this happened because of somebody who didn't know what was going on--sheer incompetence or ignorance--or this was political, under the banner that we are going to stop all the earmarks. This is not an earmark. As a matter of fact, let me ask the Senator from Texas a question. Is not the breach of taking $3.1 billion from military spending and putting it over into non-Federal spending--isn't that an earmark, a $3.1 billion earmark by itself?”