Jeff Flake: “Thank you. I know it's a very difficult thing. That is a very large bill. That earmark is somewhere in here. We have no…”

“Thank you. I know it's a very difficult thing. That is a very large bill. That earmark is somewhere in here. We have no idea where. My guess is there are a lot more of them. Let me just talk about one other one. Another questionable provision that looks like an earmark to me is a provision terminating the remaining portions of the New York Liberty Zone tax incentives program. The House-passed previous version of the energy bill gave New York a tax credit of $2 billion to build a rail line from JFK to Lower Manhattan. The bill now purports to reduce the cost of the New York tax provision to $1.1 billion, but the result is only true thanks to some very creative drafting. In fact, passage of the bill would still let New York keep a total of $2 billion of Federal taxpayer money, with at least $900 million of that coming between the year 2018 and 2019. Again, that creative drafting is somewhere in this document that we got last night, 12 hours ago. And we're expected to go through this and make sure that it complies with the rules. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this when we have very specific rules? And as I mentioned, I was the first to commend the majority for putting in some good transparency and accountability rules in January. I felt they were better than what we did last year. But your rules are only as good as your willingness to enforce them, and there seems to be no willingness here. That's the problem.”