Congress Protects Their Pork..Overrides Bush Veto For First Time
It’s all about the pork!
The vote was 79-14 to pass the bill. Enactment was a foregone conclusion, but it still marked a milestone for a president who spent his first six years with a much friendlier Congress controlled by his Republican Party. Now he confronts a more hostile, Democratic- controlled legislature, and Thursday’s vote showed that even many Republicans will defy him on spending matters dear to their political careers.
And what is it that they were so concerned about?
The spending levels in H.R. 1495 are excessive. The final conference report of $23 billion was far more than the $14 billion and $15 billion price tags the Senate and House recommended in each of their respective bills and $18.1 billion more than the president requested. The final bill includes several pork projects that are outside of the mission of the Corps of Engineers, transfers billions of dollars in costs from non-federal projects to taxpayers, and adds to the backlog of projects already in the pipeline.
The conference report also contained numerous pork-barrel projects which were “air-dropped” in at the last minute, well after the House and Senate had voted on their respective versions. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) attempted to challenge $2 billion worth of earmarks that were added in conference, but was rebuffed because Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) interpretation of the new transparency and accountability rules permits senators to add pork with impunity to authorization bills such as WRDA.
On Speaker Pelosi’s website, it says the following about WRDA: The Water Resources Development Act of 2007 will provide critical funding to small communities that have gone too long without assistance. To these communities, the projects and studies authorized by this legislation will have equally beneficial impacts on public health, environmental quality, and economic vitality.
The Speaker has her own earmark in the bill (Sec 5054) that provides for the re-development of part of the San Francisco Waterfront. The Speaker, (and/or her husband) collects rent from four separate commercial real estate properties that are very close to the waterfront location that the earmark provides “critical funding” for. According to disclosure forms, these properties resulted in rental income as high as $3 million in 2005 for the Pelosi’s and could stand to benefit from improvement to the local neighborhood that the earmark supposedly provides.
*** UPDATE (5:15 PM) – Different version have the earmark(s) in SECTIONS 5050 and 5051 ****
The Pelosi properties, all located within 5,400 feet and 9,000 feet of the WRDA earmark are:
1301 Sansome LLC
Pelosi Real Estate Partnership
Rent Income: $1 million (2005)945 Battery LLC
Pelosi Real Estate Partnership
Rental Income: $1 million (2005)901 Battery LLC
Pelosi Real Estate Partnership
Rental Income: $15,000 (2005)45 Beiden Place
Pelosi Real Estate Asset
Rental Incone: $1 million (2005)
12 Republicans voting against:
Allard
Burr
Brownback
Coburn
DeMint
Ensign
Enzi
Gregg
Kyl
Sessions
McConnell
Sununu
Just 12.
2 Dems against the override:
Feingold
McCaskill
November 8, 2007 - 02:46 PM on November 8th, 2007
And from the congressional HQ come all that oinking and we the tax payers once again have the slop them congressional hogs
