[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 153 (Monday, November 29, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8251-S8255]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EARMARKS
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, first of all, I appreciate the fact no one
objected to my unanimous consent request that I will be taking my 15
minutes from this side and 15 minutes from the other side and run them
together. I appreciate that very much.
Let me say, before getting into this subject, something really great
happened today in a bipartisan nature. We have a new Governor who will
be coming in to Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, who used to serve over in the
House. In fact, I flew her around in my airplane and helped her
campaign, and she won handily.
She made her first--she is still Governor-elect, but she made her
first commitment today, and I was very excited about it. We have a guy
in Oklahoma named Gary Ridley who has been the highway director and
then the secretary of transportation in the State now for years and
years and years. I was so proud that today she said she was going to
reappoint him.
I can remember 8 years ago when Governor Brad Henry, who is a
Democrat, was elected. I called him up and I said: I only have one
request, and that is you keep Gary Ridley because he's the best there
is in the Nation, and I really believe that. Now, 8 years later, she
has done this.
I remember when I was critical of President Clinton in 1998 when he
took $8 billion out of the highway trust fund and put it into deficit
reduction. It was something that was the wrong thing to do, and Gary
Ridley stood by my side for 8 years before we were able to correct
that. So we are going to have a great road program and hopefully we
will be able to get into some of these things. After all, that is what
we are supposed to be doing.
In a minute I am going to kind of identify myself as a different type
of person than you have been hearing from on the floor. I happen to
have the distinction of being the only Republican who objected in our
conference a couple weeks ago to the ban on earmarks, as they define
it. I just had no problem doing that at all. But it is something that
is not a fun thing to do.
Something happened tonight that went completely by everybody. It was
a total change in the Republican position, and it is a good change when
Senator McCain and Senator Coburn both talked about authorization. I
have often said that authorization is the only discipline on
appropriations, and I believe that, and that is true. So we have a
situation where I have been saying--not for months but for years--that
if you will just define an earmark as an appropriations that has not
been authorized, I am with you. I heard them tonight say that.
Unfortunately, that is not what the bill that we are going to have
before us says.
I would just like to do away with the whole word ``earmarks'' or else
define it in such a way as I just described it. Now it seems as if
everybody would be in agreement with it, and maybe that is going to be
the road we will be taking.
Let me, first of all, before I surprise a lot of people, give my
conservative credentials. I have always been ranked as one of the most
conservative or the most conservative Member of the U.S. Senate, the
National Journal's most conservative Senator for 2009. That is the last
one they gave out: ``The only Senator with a perfect score on 99 key
votes.'' I have also been voted the ``most outstanding U.S. Senator''
by Human Events.
So I am a conservative. I am a conservative but a conservative who
loves the Constitution. I have also been waiting for a long time. I
love these guys. Certainly the author of this, Senator Coburn, is a
brother and I love him. And brothers do fight sometimes. This fight is
going to be over with and we are going to have a happy ending.
I have been waiting for years for this Tea Party thing to happen, for
conservatives, anti-establishment people to come in, and I just get
very excited when I see what we are looking at. Yet we have an
administration with a majority in both Houses that we have had
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now for quite some time: spend, spend, spend. When they talk about
George W. Bush, look, it is this administration with the increase in
the debt to the amount it is now, which is a greater increase in debt
than we have had collectively with every President, every
administration from George Washington to George W. Bush.
All the time, they have been talking about earmarks that totally
distract people from the real problem. That is not the problem. I have
been listening on the floor now for the last 2 years. Every night we go
through the same thing. They talk about earmarks, earmarks, earmarks.
What they do not do is pay attention to the fact that during that
discussion this President, with his majority in both Houses, was able
to give my 20 kids and grandkids a $3 trillion deficit in 1 year. It is
mind-boggling that this could happen. But we hear the President say:
Spend, spend, spend. And he has used the words quite often: We need to
give the people what they desire. It reminds me of the story of the guy
who went in the department store and there was a beautiful, young,
voluptuous saleslady who came up and said: Sir, what is your desire? He
said: Well, my desire is to pick you up after work and go to a fine
restaurant, have dinner, and buy a bottle of champagne, go to my place,
and make mad passionate love. But I need a pair of socks.
Now, what we are going to have to understand is, there is a
difference between desire and need. That is what I am here to try to
do. To think we could actually have said today--now, the bill does not
do this, but it was said that authorizing is kind of a lost art.
Senator McCain said that. Frankly, I do not quite agree with that
because we have an authorization committee in Armed Services of which
he is the ranking member, and I am the second ranking member, and it is
something on which we have done a pretty good job. But in other areas
we have not. Keep in mind, authorizing is the only discipline that
there is to appropriating.
Now, I have a family picture I show you in the Chamber. These are my
20 kids and grandkids. I have to tell the occupier of the chair that I
was so proud to have all of them at one table on Thanksgiving. How many
people are blessed that way? Not many. But this little guy here--where
is Jase Rapert. Here he is down there on the picture, the football guy.
He came up to me one time--this is some time ago--and he said: PopI--
``I'' is for ``Inhofe.'' So MomI and PopI. He said: PopI, why is it you
do things no one else will? I said: That's the reason, because no one
else will.
I am reminded of 9 years ago when everybody--I am talking about
Democrats and Republicans--all said global warming is coming. The world
is coming to an end. It is manmade gases that cause global warming. I
looked into the science. At that time Republicans were in the majority.
I was the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee that
has that jurisdiction. I looked at that and I found out they were
cooking the science, that it was not true.
Then we had the McCain-Lieberman bill and all these things that would
pass a cap and trade which would constitute the largest tax increase in
the history of this country. We beat them one at a time. The last one
was Waxman-Markey. But, again, this has been something that has finally
evolved, that that one, my voice in the wilderness 10 years ago, is now
the prevailing thought. That is why I said to my little grandson, Jase
Rapert, that I do it because no one else will.
So let me just say this. How much more fun it would be to come down
here and do the politically correct thing and say: yes, earmarks are
bad, earmarks are bad, earmarks are bad. We are going to do away with
earmarks, and let everyone applaud before they realize what it really
is.
I hear the staffers right now telling their Members: You know, you
have the greatest opportunity. You can vote for this amendment to ban
these earmarks and you can make people think you are conservative, No.
1. No. 2, you can make President Obama happy because he is publicly
supporting this. This is what he wants because this means, as has been
said by Senator Lautenberg, Senator Harkin, and several others, if we
do not do it, that goes to the President. I want to explain how that
works in just a minute.
We could also be politically correct, so there would be a lot of them
thinking: What an opportunity this is. People will think, if I vote for
this amendment, I am a conservative. Obviously, I can make our
President happy. That will do me no harm, and I can be politically
correct.
Well, it has been demagoging now for so many years. Let me define
what Webster's Third New International Dictionary says about demagogy.
The definition of demagogy: ``Political leaders who seek to gain
personal or partisan advantage through specious, extravagant claims,
promises and charges.'' That is what we have been listening to now for
at least the last 2 years, on a regular basis.
The big problem I have with all the demagoging that has been going on
every night for the last 2 years is that people are just not paying
attention to the real problem. The real problem is not earmarks. The
real problem is that during that 2-year period--when everyone is
concerned about a few dollars--we found out we have increased the debt
more than it has been increased in the history of this country, and we
have given my 20 kids and grandkids a $3 trillion deficit in just 2
years. I thought that was not possible. I never believed that could
happen. But that is what has happened here. They have distracted
people. Get this thing behind us so we can start working on this and
not make people think we are doing something great for them when we
really are not. It would be nothing short of criminal to go through all
the trouble of electing great, new anti-establishment conservatives,
only to be politically correct and have them cede to Obama their
constitutional power of the purse. That is exactly what would happen.
I want these new people coming in to tackle the three issues to
really save America, in my opinion the deficit, the debt, and
Obamacare, and not be distracted by the bogus issue of earmarks. I say
``bogus.'' It is kind of a strong word. Why is it bogus? It is bogus
and unconstitutional, but the bogus part shows the definition of what
we are saying. The House of Representatives Republicans--not the
Democrats, the Republicans--took a moratorium, a 1-year moratorium
banning earmarks in that period of time. How did they define it? They
said:
Resolved, that it is the policy of the Republican
Conference that no Member shall request a congressional
earmark, limited tax benefit, or limited tariff benefit, as
such terms are used in clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of
the House. . . .
What is clause 9 of rule XXI? It applies to every appropriation or
authorization. In other words, they have said: we will neither
appropriate nor authorize for a whole year. Now, the Democrats are
going to do it. The President is going to do it. But they say they are
not going to do it.
Of course, the authors of this amendment, they all agreed with and
praised the House for doing this. But let's go ahead and see what the
Constitution says, article I, section 9. Several people here have
talked about the Constitution. It is times like this that I miss Bob
Byrd. Senator Byrd, talking about the Constitution right now, would be
really outraged. It is so plain what we are supposed to be doing here.
But article 1, section 9 says:
No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in
consequence of appropriations made by law.
Law, that is us. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution. That is
not the President.
I would just say if you are looking at the Senate language, it says
the term ``congressionally directed spending'' means a provision
primarily at the request of a Senator providing expenditures, and so
forth, to an entity targeted to a specific State or with any--
everything is with or to an entity. In other words, they say--again,
they are talking about all appropriations, all authorizations. We are
not going to do that anymore. We are going to let the President do
that. That is what this whole thing is about.
I was so excited when I heard for the first time them agreeing with
me. By the way, it is not appropriate for me to tell this group or to
say publicly what goes on inside a conference. In a Republican
conference, I can say what I said, and I said to my colleagues when
they were trying to get us, and they
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did, I went up in 2008 and I went ahead and voted for a ban because I
was told they would define it as an appropriation that has not been
authorized. Now, all of a sudden--they didn't do it then, and all of a
sudden they are talking about doing it, and I think I know why and I
will tell you in a minute why I think it is.
So we are having this situation now where we are saying we are not
going to authorize, we are not going to appropriate. There are two
reasons to ban Senate spending by either definition. It cedes
constitutional authority to the President and also gives cover to big
spenders.
Let's go back to that article I, section 9 chart. The Constitution
restricts spending only to the legislative branch and specifically
denies that honor to the President. We take an oath to uphold article
1, section 9 of the Constitution. Now, maybe there is some doubt about
this. If you think there is some doubt, let's go back and see what the
Founders of this country said. Let's see what the authors of the
Constitution said. Let's look at James Madison. He said:
The power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the
most complete and effectual weapon with which any
Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the
people for obtaining redress of every grievance.
The two reasons he did, if you studied the Federalist Papers, they
said they wanted Congress to do the spending because if they do it
wrong--first of all, they know the needs of the people of their State
or their--whatever the unit was at that time. If they do it wrong, they
can fire them. Look what happened on November 2. That is exactly what
happened. Alexander Hamilton said:
The legislature not only commands the purse but prescribes
the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen
should be regulated.
That is what we are supposed to be doing.
Mr. President, I have talked about Alexander Hamilton and James
Madison. Probably the guy who was most knowledgeable on the
Constitution was Justice Joseph Story, back in the early 1800s, when he
actually said in his commentary:
It is highly proper that Congress should possess the power
to decide how and when any money should be applied. If it
were otherwise, the executive would possess an unbounded
power. Congress is made the guardian of the Treasury.
I say all this to impress upon any impartial patriot that the
legislative branch--which is us--has the power to spend money. How does
a ban on earmarks cede our authority to the President? This is
something that is heavy lifting, but I think it is very important
people understand why and how this happened. This is how it works. This
is the way things work here and have for many years. The Constitution
is very clear.
The President submits a budget to the House and Senate--us. There is
an overall budget, but within the budget he says how much is going to
be spent to defend America, for roads and highways, for water and
infrastructure, all these things. We have these top lines under which
we are operating. So let's take this as an example. I happen to be the
second ranking member on the Armed Services Committee. In his budget
last year, he had, I think, $330 million set aside for a launching
system called a box of rockets. It is a good program, something we
need. But with limited funding, we on the Armed Services Committee--and
Senator McCain talked about this--have experts who look at our missile
defense system and say: How can we best defend America? The President
doesn't know this. They can say that comes from the Pentagon, but that
is not so. That is the reality. Instead of this launching system for
$330 million, we decide to spend that same amount of money and buy six
new, shiny FA-18 fighters or things that we knew we needed at this
time. It didn't cost any more money. We are taking that money he wanted
to spend on something else and we are exercising our constitutional
prerogative. If we substitute our appropriation for his budget item, it
would be an earmark by any definition. If we pass this, that means we
have to take whatever the President wants to spend on America, and we
would not do anything we wanted to. So we said six new FA-18s were what
we needed, and it didn't cost 1 cent more.
In other words, we would be letting the President do what James
Madison wanted us to do. If you look at this in the Armed Services
Committee, the unmanned aerial vehicles, right now we have 36 of them
flying around Southwest Asia over areas where there is combat, feeding
information to our kids in the field there. We would not have unmanned
aerial vehicles if it weren't for earmarks. We took something the
President wanted and put that same amount of money into these unmanned
aerial vehicles. Also, we would not have our improved armored vehicles
and add-on armor. Why do you think we on the committee spent so much
time on Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world on that? We do it to
find out our needs. Then we know more than the President knows about
the needs.
We are doing what Hamilton, Madison, and Story wanted us to do. That
is what we are supposed to do. I don't know how many of our young men
and women in uniform would be dead today if it hadn't been for that. We
wouldn't have Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. That was a
congressional earmark. We wouldn't have had $14.2 million for the
detection of landmines and suspected bombmakers and IEDs in Iraq and
Afghanistan. That was my earmark on the Armed Services Committee. It
didn't cost another cent. We merely canceled an equal amount of money
that the President wanted to spend on something else and we exercised
our Constitutional right. It didn't cost anything additional.
Eliminating earmarks wouldn't allow us to change anything in the
Obama budget and would allow President Obama to perform our
constitutional duties. As I said, constitutionally that is where we are
and that money would be transferred, for all practical purposes, to
President Obama. Second, it gives cover to big spenders. Under the
current definition, let's look at two of the four largest earmarks in
2008. Using the Senate definition ``expenditures with or to an
entity,'' the following qualified as earmarks. But rather than arguing
as to whether they are earmarks, I will put them up to get a
perspective. These are two of them in 2008. The TARP is one that I
think--I know people get upset when I say this, but 10, 15, 20 years
from now, historians will say the most egregious vote ever cast by the
Senate was on the $700 billion bailout. You know where that went--AIG,
Chrysler, and the General Motors bailout. That $700 billion was given
to an unelected bureaucrat to do what he preferred.
Next was the PEPFAR bill, $50 billion. The author of this amendment,
Senator Coburn, voted for both of these. I voted against them. This is
something I wish all Members would do. This is called the Inhofe
factor. I know I am not as smart as a lot of guys around here. When I
see billions and trillions of dollars, I have to put it somehow into a
perspective that I know what this costs my people in Oklahoma.
In 2009, $2 trillion in taxes was paid by individuals across the
country, and $18 billion came from Oklahomans, which is about 1 percent
of the Federal total. The average Oklahoma individual's tax return was
$11,100 that year. Therefore, the average Oklahoma taxpayer is
responsible for providing the percentage shown here of the total
Federal revenue. For every $10 million in spending, Oklahomans pay
about a nickel--not all the State but each taxpayer who files a tax
return in Oklahoma. So that is what we have.
Put the next chart up. We see how that works in reality. If you take
the amount and use the same factor to those two bills, the TARP bill,
the $700 billion bailout, and the $50 billion PEPFAR bill, that is $750
billion, and you apply that factor, each of my tax-paying families in
Oklahoma would have to have an obligation of $3,500 that year. That is
what it would cost. Someone might argue that they didn't spend the
whole $700 billion, that some of that came back in. That is true. But
they authorized it and said you can do it. They were willing to have
each taxpayer in Oklahoma spend $3,552 in taxes. The total amount of
requests that I had--in other words, earmarks--were some $80 million,
and that was mostly in the area of defense. Using the same factor for
each family in
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Oklahoma to get to the $80 million, because we are trying to defend
America, it would cost them 40 cents. Those are earmarks--40 cents
versus $3,552 that the author of this amendment we are talking about
would have to spend. You know, I think at some point you have to look
and see what this cost is.
If you go back to the chart No. 4 there, several things have been
said today that were not true. I am not saying they intentionally
misrepresented the truth, but they did it inadvertently while being
caught up in this thing. The statement was made by a Senator--it might
have been the occupant of the chair. The statement was made that, as
earmarks are going up, this is causing spending to go up. That is not
what is happening. If you take the total amount of earmarks in 2010,
according to OMB, that would have been $11 billion. If you look and see
what happened each year, it goes down in the amount. It started at $18
billion 5 years ago and went down to $15 billion and then to $12
billion and now to $11 billion. So it is coming down. That is why we
have to look at this in reality.
I notice my good friend, Senator DeMint, from South Carolina, has
been active in this, and the last time I spoke on the floor I pointed
out that Senator DeMint had all these different earmarks that he has
been able to get for his State, and I don't know how you can talk about
eliminating earmarks and yet do that.
The platitudes that are used--it is interesting when you don't have
the facts on your side, you don't have logic on your side, but you have
a population who has been led to believe earmarks are bad--that means
appropriations are bad, authorizations are bad unless they are done by
the President; those individuals say earmarks are a gateway drug that
needs to be eliminated in order to demonstrate that we are serious
about fiscal restraint. There is only one problem with that. It is not
true.
According to the Office of Management and Budget, again, and the
Federal spending watchdog groups such as Citizens Against Government
Waste, earmarks have dramatically decreased over the last several
years. I mentioned 2005, $19 billion; 2008, $16 billion; 2009, $15
billion; 2010, $11 billion. So while the total number of earmarks and
all dollars of earmarks have declined, the Obama deficit has ballooned
to $3 trillion in 2 years. So obviously they are not a gateway drug,
but it sounds good. But these are the platitudes.
When they say it is symptomatic of all this garbage, we are talking
about real dollars here. And we can't get down to doing something about
real spending until we quit demagoguing this issue.
I am going to give an easy way to correct this problem in just a
minute, but if you need further proof, in 2009 the Senate performed a
rare action of considering many appropriations bills individually
rather than doing the irresponsible thing we are talking about doing
now and lumping them all into one bill to consider at the end of the
year. The value of considering these bills individually is that it
gives Senators the opportunity to exercise some oversight in
government.
In 2009, Senators could offer amendments to both cut spending and
strike particular earmarks if they desired, and they did desire.
Between the months of July and November of 2009, there were 18 votes
specifically targeting earmarks. Now, they failed, but if they had
passed, it wouldn't have saved one penny. Instead of putting the money
back into the pockets of the American people by reducing spending or
shrinking the deficit, these efforts to eliminate earmarks would have
put the money into the hands of President Obama by allowing his
administration to spend the money as it saw fit. At the end of the day,
none of the money would have been saved. President Obama wins, the
American people lose.
In another case, Members offered an amendment to strike funding out
of a program called Save America's Treasures, for specific art centers
throughout the United States, but the money was simply shifted to allow
the Obama administration to do it. The same thing happened with the
transportation projects. Several Members offered amendments to strike a
variety of transportation projects in many States, and they were
unsuccessful. So what happened? That money went back to the bureaucracy
controlled by President Obama. Not one of these actions saved a dime,
but it made President Obama happy because it went back to his coffers.
We have clearly demonstrated two points. First of all, spending is
the exclusive obligation of the Senate and, secondly, killing an
earmark doesn't save a dime; it merely gives money to President Obama.
It reminds me of what I went through 10 years ago when I couldn't get
anyone to understand how they were cooking the science and why we
should not pass a cap and trade. Everybody thought the world was coming
to an end, and I was that one person. Granted, that was 10 years ago,
but now it is the prevailing thought here in Congress. In fact, the
United Nations, which started the whole concept of global warming, is
having their big annual party next week and not even one--none--of the
media is going to show up. Hardly anyone is going to show up to the
thing because people realize it was a phony issue. It was, in fact, the
greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. I said it, and
everyone got mad at me and even hated me. So I do not mind being the
only one, and I am the only one on this.
A couple of good things have happened, though. It has been mentioned
by several of those who were the most adamant in opposition to
earmarks. In the case of Rand Paul, from Kentucky, our new Senator--
whom I am so happy to have with us--has said he would argue for things
for the State of Kentucky. And Senator Mike Lee said:
I wouldn't say there's a mandate to stop spending for roads
or any other general purpose like that.
Another House Member, Michele Bachmann, said--and I think this has
already been stated by one of the other Senators:
I don't believe that building roads and bridges and
interchanges should be considered an earmark.
Great. I agree. That is my whole point. So we are seeing these people
now coming around and saying: Well, we do have a job to do.
Senator Chambliss said:
There are times when crises arise or issues come forth of
such importance to Georgia, such as the Port of Savannah,
that I reserve the right to ask Congress and the President to
approve funding.
Well, there it is. So I would say those individuals who are on the
other side realize that is the wrong side. But let me say something
else. I am very proud of some of the talk shows. I am on quite a few
talk shows. And when you get a chance to talk, the way I am now, and
explain to people what the situation is--I am looking now at I think 12
major talk show hosts in America who now pretty much agree with what I
am saying tonight: Mike Gallagher, Mark Levin, Dennis Prager, Scott
Hennen, Janet Parshall, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Savage, Crane Durham, Lars
Larson, Jason Lewis, Rusty Humphries, Jerry Doyle, and quite a few
others. And it was not easy for them to say: Maybe Inhofe has a point,
so let's look at this a little closer.
So let me just say there is a solution. And I have to give credit
where credit is due. These are not my thoughts. This is what I did. We
have eight great Americans and the conservative groups they head up,
and I am talking about Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against
Government Waste; Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethnics in Washington; Steve Ellis, Taxpayers for
Common Sense; Craig Holman, Public Citizen; Jim Walsh, Rich Gold, Manny
Rouvelas, and Dave Wenhold. Thanks to them, we can put this whole
earmark issue to rest because they authored ``The 5 Principles of
Earmark Reform.'' There they are, the five principles of earmark
reform. These are all the conservatives who said we really need to do
something about this and at the same time preserve our constitution. So
I introduced, a couple of weeks ago, S. 3939, and what I did is I took
everything they had and I put that into a bill. And there it is. So
take it a section at a time.
No. 1 of the five principles: To cut the cord between earmarks and
campaign contributions, Congress should limit earmarks directed to
campaign contributors--exactly what S. 3939 does.
Section 2:
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No earmark beneficiary shall make contributions aggregating
more than $5,000.
The second principle: to eliminate any connection between legislation
and campaign contributions. That is the second. The third principle: To
increase transparency, Congress should create a new database of all
congressional earmarks. And it goes on, and they elaborate and say this
is all something you can find, but you can't get your hands on it. It
is too complicated. So consequently we put in our bill, in section 4,
the following:
The Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House
shall post on a public Web site of their respective houses, a
link to the earmark database maintained by the Office of
Management and Budget.
Every one of these things--and I could go through each and every
one--is answered in S. 3939. So if you really want to do something
about it, pass that bill and you will have solved the problem and you
will have kept our constitutional duties intact.
We did one more thing because it goes one more step. This is very
important. There was an oversight, but they all agree with this now.
This goes a step further. It says that the administration--President
Obama, the bureaucracies--will have the same transparency as senatorial
earmarks. So Senator McCain talked about lobbying these bureaucracies.
Sure, they are doing it, because if we don't do the spending or the
appropriating and authorizing, then the President does it. So the
bureaucracy is doing that. So we have a section in this bill that
subjects them to the same thing.
Do you remember when Sean Hannity came up with the 102 most egregious
earmarks? This is just some of them. There were 102, and I read them
all on the floor from this podium, and I did it to make sure people
understood what he had found out. I said at the end of reading all of
these earmarks--look at some of these: $300,000 for helicopter
equipment to detect radioactive rabbit droppings--that all 102 have
something in common: not one of them was a congressional earmark. They
were all bureaucratic Obama earmarks. So that is the reason for that.
And if you want reform, that is how to get it.
I know there will be some Members who will not be able to resist the
fact that they can have a great opportunity with one vote. They can
make people think they are conservative and give President Obama what
he wants, and they can be politically correct. But, again, we have a
solution to the problem. That solution will come.
Mr. President, in that conference I mentioned about 30 minutes ago, I
said that if you want to do something to do away with the earmark and
all this, all you have to do is define an earmark as an appropriation
that has not been authorized. Authorizing committees are the discipline
for appropriations. A lot of our appropriating friends won't like this
idea, but that would do it. We heard several of the Senators, including
my junior Senator, the author of this amendment, and Senator McCain,
saying this is good, we have done away with authorizing. We need to
authorize these things.
In the Armed Services Committee, we have experts in every field. One
of the experts is a group of people who look at our missile defense
system. Right now, we are in very serious problems in this country by
taking down the site in Poland that would stop the ground-based
interceptor site. That is something we should be doing. We need to have
redundancy. We know we can hit a bullet with a bullet, and we should do
that. We have the experts who know how to do that.
So I would say we have an opportunity. We can reform this. We can
subject the bureaucracy to the same transparency to which we are
subjected. We should do away completely with terms such as ``earmarks''
as people are thinking of them in their minds and go to having them
redefined as appropriations that have not been authorized. I know it is
a hard concept and one that not many people want to believe, but it is
much easier to oversimplify it and say that all earmarks are bad. Well,
if you define them properly, I agree they would all be bad. Anything
that is appropriated that is not authorized, in my opinion, is bad and
should be done away with.
So with that, this one voice in the wilderness, one conservative is
saying this is the true story. If you really do want to cede our
constitutional authority to President Obama, you can do it by passing
this amendment. This allows them to get the authority we have. And if
you really believe that is the thing to do, after looking at the
Constitution and what Justice Joseph Story and Hamilton and Madison all
said we are supposed to be doing here, let's seriously consider that
and resolve this problem, put it behind us so we can quit distracting
from the big spending going on today that has given us a $3 trillion
deficit in 2 years.
With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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