Top 20 Earmarkers

By GLENN THRUSH | Politico

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government spending watchdog, has released its breakdown of the biggest earmarkers.

Not surprisingly, former Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) tops the list.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Finance Committee and the Senate’s highest-profile critic of the bank bailouts, snagged the No. 2 spot, representing one of the nation’s poorest states — and a state where even the smallest tax hikes have to be submitted to a public vote. Missouri Sen. Kit Bond, a senior Republican on the Appropriations Committee’s transportation and housing subcommittee, was the third-largest recipient of earmarks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) brought home around $26.6 million — only about half the bacon delivered to Kentucky by Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

Following are the top 20 Senate earmark recipients — 12 Democrats, 8 Republicans.

1. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.): $122,804,900
2. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.): $114,484,250
3. Kit Bond (R-Mo.): $85,691,491
4. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.): $76,899,425
5. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.): $75,908,475
6. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): $74,000,750
7. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa): $66,860,000
8. James Inhofe (R-Okla.): $53,133,500
9. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): $51,186,000
10. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii): $46,380,205
11. Patty Murray (D-Wash.): $39,228,250
12. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.): $36,547,100
13. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.): $36,161,125
14. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.): $35,577,250
15. Robert Casey (D-Pa.): $27,169,750
16. Harry Reid (D-Nev.): $26,628,613
17. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.): $25,320,000
18. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.): $23,832,000
19. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.): $21,952,250
20. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), retired: $19,588,625

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Obama To Sign Bill Despite Earmarks

By Ginger Thompson | International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON: White House officials said that President Barack Obama would sign a $410 billion spending bill that includes thousands of pet projects, known as earmarks, despite campaign promises to put an end to the practice.

In appearances on television talk shows Sunday, Obama’s budget director and chief of staff both played down the issue.

“This is last year’s business,” Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in an appearance on the ABC program “This Week.” “We want to just move on. Let’s get this bill done, get it into law and move forward.”

Republican leaders, meanwhile, accused the president of breaking his promises to change Washington’s ways …

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Related News:
More on Earmarks: Obama’s Chief of Staff Has Some in Bill
Senate Keeps Pet Projects in Spending Bill
Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) Uncovers Who Are the Biggest Senate Earmarkers: Free Downloadable Spreadsheet

Democrats Boosting Domestic Spending atop Stimulus

By ANDREW TAYLOR | Associated Press

WASHINGTON – With one of their own in the White House, Democrats in Congress are moving to give domestic government agencies 8 percent more money, on average, to spend this year atop the whopping $787 billion in economic stimulus funds.

Just a day before President Barack Obama gives Congress a blueprint for the upcoming 2010 budget year, the House is taking up a massive $410 billion spending bill wrapping together the budgets for a dozen Cabinet departments through next September.

The big increases — including a 21 percent boost for a popular program that feeds infants and poor women and a 10 percent hike for Section 8 housing vouchers for the poor — represent a clear win for Democrats who spent most of the past decade battling with President George W. Bush over money for domestic programs.

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group, counted 8,570 pet projects totaling $7.7 billion inserted into the bill by lawmakers. The so-called earmarks include $22 million for an addition for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, dozens of grants to states and counties to battle methamphetamine, and a new $250,000 siren for St. Paul, Minn., to warn residents of tornadoes and other emergencies.

House Republican leaders attacked the bill as excessive, especially on the heels of the giant stimulus package, which provided $311 billion to many of the same agencies. Nonetheless, the measure is expected to sail through Congress in time to meet a March 6 deadline. That’s when a temporary funding measure expires …

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House to Vote on Earmark Ethics Probe as PMA Clients Show up in Omnibus

By Jonathan Allen | CQ Politics

As lawmakers prepare to consider a $410 billion spending bill carrying pet projects for clients of a lobbying firm under FBI investigation, the House will vote as early as Tuesday on whether to start an ethics investigation into the relationship between earmarks and campaign contributions.

The vote could put majority Democrats and at least a few Republicans in an uncomfortable spot. They will have to choose between authorizing the House ethics committee to investigate the most delicate of political relationships or publicly voting against such a probe.

The action comes as House Democrats are trying to pass a massive fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill (HR 1105) that carries thousands of earmarks, including several for clients of The PMA Group, a lobbying firm that is disbanding in the wake of an FBI raid of its offices and an investigation into whether it used straw donors to circumvent campaign finance laws.

The pitcher of this political curveball is Rep. Jeff Flake, who introduced a resolution late Monday that calls for an ethics investigation into “the relationship between earmark requests already made by members and the source and timing of past campaign contributions.” Flake’s resolution qualifies as “privileged,” meaning it has priority status for floor consideration …

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FACT CHECK: Examining Obama’s Job, Pork Claims

By CALVIN WOODWARD | Associated Press

WASHINGTON – At least Route 31 is a road to somewhere. President Barack Obama had it both ways when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana and later at a prime-time news conference. He bragged in Indiana about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.

Obama’s sales pitch on the enormous package he wants Congress to make law has sizzle as well as steak. He’s projecting job creation numbers that may be impossible to verify and glossing over some ethical problems that bedeviled his team.

In recent years, the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska came to symbolize the worst excesses of congressional earmarks, a device that allows a member of Congress to add money for local projects in legislation, practically under the radar.

Nothing so bold, or specific, as that now-discarded bridge project is contained in the stimulus package. That’s not to say the package steers clear of waste or parochial interests. Obama played to such interests Monday, speaking at one point as if he’d come to fill potholes …

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