The Asbury Park Press reports:
So much for trimming the pork.
The practice of decorating legislation with billions of dollars in pet projects and federal contracts is thriving on Capitol Hill … despite public outrage that helped flip control of Congress two years ago.
More than 11,000 of those "earmarks,'' worth nearly $15 billion in all, were slipped last year into legislation telling the government where to spend taxpayers' money this year, keeping them at the center of Washington's culture of money, influence and politics. Now comes an election-year encore.
It's a pay-to-play sandbox where waste and abuse often obscure the good that earmarks can do.
An examination of many of those earmarks by The Associated Press and two dozen newspapers participating in a project sponsored by the Associated Press Managing Editors found much greater disclosure since 2006 but no end to what has become ingrained behavior in Congress. Assisting the project were two nonprofit and nonpartisan watchdog organizations … the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Millions of the dollars support lobbying firms that help companies, universities, local governments and others secure what critics like Republican presidential candidate John McCain call pork-barrel spending. The law forbids using federal grants to lobby, but lobbyists do charge clients fees that often equal 10 percent of the largesse.
Earmark winners and their lobbyists often reward their benefactors with campaign contributions. For many members of
Congress, especially those on the Appropriations committees, campaign donations from earmark-seeking lobbyists and corporate executives are the core of their fundraising.
Rules forbid lawmakers from raising campaign funds from congressional offices, but members and their aides sometimes
find ways to skirt them.
"I know a bunch of members that if you go in to see them, somewhere in the conversation they somehow say, "Well, we were looking through our list of campaign contributors and didn't happen to see you there,'‚'' said Frank Cushing, a lobbyist with the National Group, which lobbies on appropriations bills. "Is there a quid pro quo? No, not directly, but you'd have to be pretty dense not to figure it out.''
The explicit campaign solicitations usually take place in the days following a meeting where an earmark is discussed.
"You can ask any lobbyist in town. You bring a new client in to see a member and everything is nice-nice and you have a good meeting and everybody's exchanging business cards,'' said another lobbyist who focuses on earmarks. "Within 48 hours, the clients and their lobbyist … me … will get a fundraising phone call.'' That lobbyist requested anonymity, saying there could be no conversation on the subject without it.
you'll want to read this one just for this quote:
"Hiring a lobbyist to try to get you an earmark is a pretty good investment, because you can get a 10-, 20-, 30-fold return without frankly all that much work,'' said Anthony Nownes, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. "It's a such a win-win situation for everybody. The legislator gets to tell his or her constituent that he or she quite literally brought home the bacon, the lobbyist gets to tell his or her client that they did the same thing, and
the constituents get all the goodies.''
Theft through majority voting.
