Political Quotes

“To explain the urgency behind my letter to the President, I wish to remind my colleagues in this body, many of whom were not in the Congress before enactment of the moratorium, just how bad the earmarking epidemic became. For the uninitiated, the term ``earmark'' is a euphemism for when lawmakers work to circumvent the regular, normal appropriations process in order to secure special funding for projects in their home districts or their States. This resulted in Federal tax dollars being doled out to Members of Congress on a whim, bypassing normal rigorous Federal and public vetting. Instead of focusing on oversight responsibilities or devising legislative solutions for the Nation's most pressing challenges, lawmakers and staffers devoted thousands of man-hours toward filling earmark requests. Congressional appropriators and appropriations committees transformed into what were termed ``favor factories,'' abandoning oversight responsibilities to focus on rationing out pork. To me, that was one of the most insidious parts of the whole earmarking era. We have oversight responsibilities in Congress. There is a huge Federal budget on which we should be providing oversight, but instead of poring over agency spending and searching for waste in our trillion- dollar discretionary budget, Members and staff devoted countless hours to roughly 2 or 3 percent of the Federal budget.…”