Jeff Flake: “I rise today to offer a series of amendments on earmark limitations to the Transportation, Treasury, Housing and Urban…”

“I rise today to offer a series of amendments on earmark limitations to the Transportation, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development 2007 appropriation. While the Appropriations Committee is touting a two-thirds reduction in earmark spending, the sad news is that even with that decrease, the bill still contains more than $930 million in pork-barrel spending. With more than 1,500 earmarks, this bill contains more earmarks than all of the appropriation bills passed in each of the years 1995, 1996, or 1997. This bill provides for new zoo docks, opera houses, bike paths, hiking trails, and 1,500 other congressional priorities, all paid for at the expense of the taxpayer. The most disturbing part of this bill is that these earmarks are paid for with ``funny money,'' with fictitious offsets that would have never left the Treasury to begin with. So while you will hear during this debate many times you are not saving money by getting rid of these earmarks, all the Appropriations Committee would have to do is to simply say we are not going to fund earmarks this year. We will take a lower 302(b) allocation or we will apply it elsewhere instead of funding these earmarks. So that argument that you will hear again and again is simply wrong. We were unable to identify whose earmarks are in this bill many times, who requested them, or how they were chosen, because we were simply given the manager's amendment last Wednesday, I believe, with these 1,500 earmarks.…”