John Shadegg: “I want to compliment him for conducting this special order on earmarks tonight. It's an issue where the American people…”

“I want to compliment him for conducting this special order on earmarks tonight. It's an issue where the American people need to understand what is going on in the government that they elect. I think most of them, if they harken back to their civics class in high school or grade school, would be stunned at what happens here and would find it, quite frankly, disgusting, because it is. It is a perversion of a system. We use the term earmark, and we try to describe it. I am not certain that many people at home fully understand how the process works. To some degree, if you don't understand how the process works, you can't understand why some of us think it is so outrageous. Some of us think that we were each elected to come here to represent our congressional districts, and we were also elected in representing them to look at the good of the Nation. Some of us don't believe that we were elected primarily to come to Washington and take as much money as humanly possible from the other taxpayers around the country and rip it out of their taxpayers' pockets and put it in our congressional districts. I don't remember being taught that in my civics book. Yet, the way the earmark system works in this Congress today, it is outrageously inequitable.”