Jeff Flake: “I am pained to say there is precious little of either of it in this bill. The previous speaker mentioned that the voters…”

“I am pained to say there is precious little of either of it in this bill. The previous speaker mentioned that the voters were aware of the needs that existed here in Congress, and the majority party paid the price in November. I fully agree with that. I wasn't quiet on that subject in the last Congress. I was overjoyed to see that the Democrats came in in January, and not that they came in in January; but when they did, they actually enacted earmark reform that I felt was a little stronger than what we had done a few months previous. Having said that, then we go to where we are today where we rolled back a lot of those protections that were there or simply ignored them. The rules that you put in place are only as good as your willingness to enforce them. We just heard this past week that the earmark rules simply are going to be ignored. If a bill comes to the floor, and if it is certified to have no earmarks, we have no recourse, even though there might be earmarks, and have been in a few of the bills already this year. Now we have heard that the plan is to take the appropriation bills through the House process and into the conference process without any earmarks, and simply air drop the earmarks during the conference process. This is not more sunlight. This is actually keeping earmarks secret until it's too late to do anything about it.”