The Lieberman Pledge/Jeff Flake contra earmarking
Dick Morris writes at The Hill:
To avoid Abramoff fallout, take the Lieberman Pledge
Just do it!That is the message from Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). Don’t wait for legislation or ethics rulings, just follow his example and voluntarily announce that you and your staff will not accept gifts, meals or travel from lobbyists or groups with interests before Congress.
As Lieberman says, “It’s time to try to set some examples here.”
Yes, Senator Lieberman, that’s the way to do it.
Read the entire column.
And while we’re at it…
Rep Jeff Flake has a fine op-ed in today’s NY Times. (This may require a login or subscription.) Flake is a Republican representative from Arizona.
Superb lede, which not only explains the pork barrel and corruption game of budget “earmarking” in Congress, it explains the origin of the word:
BACK on the F-Bar Ranch, when I was too young to load the chute, de-horn, vaccinate, hold a hot iron or otherwise make myself useful as my father and older brothers branded calves, I would spend my time collecting “earmarks” — V-shaped pieces of a calf’s left ear detached with two swift strokes of a pocketknife. I would stack these earmarks on the fence surrounding the corral as an unofficial tally of our progress.
Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here I am in Congress, again being asked to collect earmarks. Sorry. I’ve had enough of that.
Earmarking — in which members of Congress secure federal dollars for pork-barrel projects by covertly attaching them to huge spending bills — has become the currency of corruption in Congress. It is not just the rising number of earmarks (more than 15,000 last year — up from around 1,200 a decade ago), or the dollar amount ($27 billion) that is troubling. More disturbing is that earmarks are used as inducements to get members to sign on to large spending measures. (The disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was astute when he referred to the House Appropriations Committee as an “earmark favor factory.”)
