Wayne Allard: “I spoke on this particular amendment offered by Senator Gregg last week, and I came to the Chamber and expressed my…”

“I spoke on this particular amendment offered by Senator Gregg last week, and I came to the Chamber and expressed my strong support for what Senator Gregg is trying to do. For the life of me, I don't understand why we would want to put an issue such as this off, because it adds transparency to the process. That is the name of the bill we have before us: the Legislative Transparency Act of 2007. What the Gregg amendment would do is to allow the President to identify certain items in bills that are earmarks or may be classified as pork barrel spending. Then once those provisions have been identified, they would get singled out, and then, the President can bring those forward and allow the House and the Senate to vote on those separately. What happens so many times in legislation that comes before the Congress is a process which is called logrolling. It is an old term; it has been around for a long time. You just keep adding issues in there and adding issues in there and make a piece of legislation bigger, and you pick up votes, and the bill gets so big and cumbersome that it is difficult to find people who are going to vote against it because there are so many issues in there they support.”