Jeff Flake: “Mr. Chairman, I rise again in support of the amendment. Again, we're being asked to approve a bill that increases…”

“Mr. Chairman, I rise again in support of the amendment. Again, we're being asked to approve a bill that increases spending over the President's request by more than $2 billion. The majority party wisely, I believe, in the report accompanying this bill, explained that there are several misuses in spending; that there is money that is being misspent. How in the world can we, then, appropriate $2 billion more than was requested by the administration? If we believe in fiscal discipline, we should act like it, and we simply can't afford to spend this much more money. I would also, again, talk about the earmark process. It seems to me that if we have a transparent process, or we require Members to actually put their names next to earmarks and to indicate the entity that the earmark goes to, that that ought to mean something, that we should be able to do something with that information. Last summer, during the appropriation process, I offered I believe it was 39 earmark amendments, and I got beat on every one of them. I was beat like a rented mule. I never got more than, I think, 90 votes, and most times under 50 for those that we called a roll call on. It was because of the process of log rolling. I'll vote against your earmark or amendment if you'll vote against the others. And so it goes. But we never had the luxury of actually knowing whose earmark that was.”