Obey shines light on earmarking process, but GOP labels move a hollow gesture

House Appropriations Chairman Dave Obey (D-Wis.) yesterday opened the earmarking process to public scrutiny after taking a drubbing over plans to keep member projects under wraps until bills have passed both chambers.

“I don’t know how you could be more open,” Obey said. “This is real review rather than some ‘let’s pretend’ phony review.”

{mosads}Dissatisfied Republicans said they would go forward with plans to gum up the legislative works to protest Democratic secrecy on earmarks. They called Obey’s plan a hollow gesture since it will not allow them to challenge individual earmarks in floor votes.

“There’s no real transparency or accountability in that plan whatsoever,” said Brian Kennedy, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). “We’re asking for a vote on earmarks out in the public domain.”

Obey also raised the prospect of eliminating all earmarks if Republicans keep “demagoguing” the issue, saying he wants to call the bluff of members questioning his commitment to reform.

“I’m not going to carry water for them for them while they’re shooting at me coming up over the pass,” Obey said. “Two-thirds of the Republican conference wants a hell of a lot more earmarks than I do.”

Boehner does not, his spokesman said.

“I think that would sit just fine with the Republican leader,” said Kennedy, whose boss has a policy of not seeking earmarks for his district.
The sniping and maneuvering comes at the start of a three-week period to be dominated by appropriations in the House. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) has announced that members will not be heading home this week until the military construction, energy and water and Interior spending bills are sent to the Senate.

Obey originally said House earmarks would be kept secret until they were inserted into the conference bill. By then, members cannot change them and can only vote up or down on the bill. Since the passage of earmarks is then all but a done deal, critics refer to it as “air-dropping.”

The reason, Obey said, was that the committee staff needed to sift through the deluge of 32,000 earmark requests submitted by members, and they already were far behind. The staff, he said, had been overwhelmed by months of work on the Iraq supplemental, handling the appropriations bills that Republicans had left hanging last year and dealing with a subpoena for thousands of committee documents in the investigation of now-imprisoned former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.). The review, which took more than three months, now is complete.

The “air-dropping” plans elicited howls that Democrats were reverting to the same cloak-and-dagger process that typified the practices of Cunningham and former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who once referred to earmark-laden appropriations bills as “favor factories.”

It seemed to go against the crackdown on earmarks promised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). She told reporters shortly after last year’s election, “I would just as soon do away with all of them.”

Republicans said Obey and Democratic leaders were backsliding on Democratic promises to run a more open and honest chamber and dubbed the money reserved for future earmarks a “slush fund.” In Obey’s home state, the Wisconsin State Journal editorialized that Obey had gone “gone from hero to villain.”

Even some Democratic appropriators were alarmed, but for different reasons. Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) said failing to add earmarks up front might give senators an advantage in getting their projects.

“It could put us at a disadvantage if we go to conference and the Senate has their earmarks out,” Moran said. “But if it works, then it was a stroke of genius.”

Yesterday, Obey came out with a new plan to issue a list before the August recess of all the earmarks appropriators plan to take to conference committee in September. That would put them under public scrutiny for the month of August.

Members would be invited to “question or challenge” any request, the author can respond, and the committee will decide whether to take it to conference.

But members still would be unable to try to strike the earmarks on the floor, because their only vote will be on a conference report.
Obey said there is little point in trying to strike earmarks on the floor, because such attempts never work. He noted that Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has tried at least 14 times to strike earmarks without success.

Today, Republicans plan to start procedural sabotage. They plan to offer amendments to highlight ongoing earmarks from years past they deem wasteful, such as $1.3 million across three years to study razor burn. They will force each amendment to be read in its entirety.
They’ve also considered filing a “discharge petition” to force a vote on the Republican earmark reform legislation that was adopted in the 109th Congress, allowing votes on individual earmarks.