SSDP (Same Sh*t Different Party)
Democrats already skirting reforms
House Appropriations Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., told fellow lawmakers he intends to keep requests for earmarks out of pending spending bills, at least for now. Mr. Obey said the committee will deal with them at the end of the appropriations process in the closed-door meetings between House and Senate negotiators known as conference committees.Democrats had complained bitterly in recent years that Republicans routinely slipped multimillion-dollar pet projects into spending bills at the end of the legislative process, preventing any chance for serious public scrutiny. Now Democrats are poised to do the same.
“I don’t give a damn if people criticize me or not,” Mr. Obey said.
Can we say arrogance boys and girls?
Mr. Obey’s spokeswoman, Kirstin Brost, said his intention is not to keep the projects secret. Rather, she said, so many requests for spending were made to the appropriations panel — more than 30,000 this year — that its staff has been unable to study them and decide their validity.
“I have to sign off on that stuff,” Mr. Obey said. “And I’m going to make damn sure that we’ve done everything we can do to make sure that they’re legitimate projects, so that you don’t get embarrassed by some idiot who is putting in money for a project that happens to benefit himself and his wife.”
Here’s a solution, how about you only approve what the panel can review in the time they have? Go round-robin through the requests, and only approve those whose validity the panel can confirm. I can tell you what’s going on in these closed-door meetings. Since they no longer are accountable to anyone (who knows what they are doing?), they are going through and rubber-stamp approving anything they want.