Jeff Flake: “let me just say if you can justify this earmark for a recreational center to help them basically defray cost of…”

“let me just say if you can justify this earmark for a recreational center to help them basically defray cost of memberships or to rebuild or renovate, you could do that for any recreational center in the country. There is nothing that I can see, and I wish the sponsor of the amendment would have come to the floor to actually defend it or shed some light on what makes this special, why there is a Federal nexus here that doesn't exist with other recreational centers across the country. I wish we could have had that debate or not. So we have to assume that this is no different than any recreational center anywhere in the country. So if you can justify this one, you can justify any of them. And we simply can't afford that, and we shouldn't continue just to say, well, we have cut the number of earmarks or dollar value in half. I mean, we are trying to get back to fiscal sobriety here after a binge that took place for years, and I admitted that that binge was my party. But if we are trying to get back to sobriety, it doesn't count to say, all right, we are only going to drink half as much this year as we did before. That's just not acceptable. This process is out of control. It remains out of control. And this earmark is a great example of that. If we can approve earmarks for this kind of thing, anything goes. Katy bar the door. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.”