[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 16104]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           POWER OF THE PURSE

  (Mr. CLEAVER asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. CLEAVER. Mr. Speaker, later today, the WRRDA bill will come 
before this body. I intend to vote against it. The reason is that there 
are 23 earmarks in it. I support all of those projects, but I don't 
have an earmark in it--and I want one.
  I am not one of those people who is going to pretend to the public, 
as many of us have, that earmarks cost the budget any more money than 
they do. They do not. We go around and talk about the ``bridge to 
nowhere.'' There is a bridge. It is called the Gravina Island Bridge.
  The worse thing about this is that, constitutionally, we have the 
power of the purse. We have given it to the administration. So they put 
23 projects out here and said, Well, they used to be earmarks. That is 
like cutting off the tail of an alligator and putting some little ears 
on him and saying, It used to be a dog.
  Ladies and gentlemen, this is wrong. The public needs to understand 
that this earmark business is damaging the Constitution because it is 
our job to spend the purse.

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