Obama & Earmark Dishonesty Dialogue 3

Friend and frequent commenter A.I. makes some interesting points in response to last night’s post.  The main question is whether there were earmarks in President Obama’s “Economic Recovery Act.”  A.I. says this:

Sorry, you still haven't cited "earmarks" in the stimulus. The MSNBC piece was written before reconciliation was complete and before final passage. Were even the no-cost provisions included in the final bill--the version Obama was referring to as not having earmarks?

Good point.  I haven’t been able to determine which of the House earmarks were included in the bill and which weren’t.  Have you?  Are you sure that “three hospital” thing isn’t still in there? 

It is true that “earmarks” is not a precisely defined concept, but it isn’t meaningless.  An earmark has to originate with (or perhaps be “inserted by”) some Congressman.  It has to be targeted to his or her district, or to some special interest the Congressman wants to benefit.  In an omnibus spending bill, that’s about all you can say.  In something like the stimulus package, I think you can say something more: it raise the cost of the bill without contributing to the primary purpose of the bill.  So, for example, an allocation of money for pineapple parasite research (I just made that up), inserted in a defense appropriations bill, by a Congressman to be spent in his district, that would be an unambiguous earmark.  It wouldn’t matter if the language was carefully tailored to disguise the bill’s specific target. 

Well, this morning Kimberley Kindy came to my rescue.  From the Washington Post:

Deep inside the economic stimulus package is a $1 billion prize that, in five short words, shows the benefits of being in power in Washington.

The funding, for "fossil energy research and development," is likely to go to a power plant in a small Illinois town, a project whose longtime backers include a group of powerful lawmakers from the state, among them President Obama…

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D), who led the Illinois delegation's efforts, worked the system, blocking some Bush administration appointments and holding hearings to publicly vilify the officials who stood in his way.

"This has been my longest, most difficult battle in Congress," Durbin said.

The fight got a lot easier after Obama was elected. Within weeks, his transition team met with FutureGen's industry partners. In January, when Obama announced his plans for an economic stimulus bill, Durbin and other members of the Illinois delegation quickly crafted a $2 billion line item to fund a "near zero-emissions power plant(s)," and Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) placed it in the Senate version of the legislation.

Republicans in both chambers pointed out that only one shovel-ready project in the country met the criteria spelled out in the bill: the FutureGen plant in Mattoon.

Okay, here we have a line item carefully crafted to look general but only apply to a project in Durbin’s state of Illinois.  It wasn’t inserted by Durbin but by Senator Dorgan on his behalf.  I guess that’s why the Democrats claim it isn’t an earmark, but that’s chicanery, isn’t it?  Do you really think that this is the only one that made it into the stimulus package? 

This is a genuine, full-tilt, twenty-four carat earmark in the stimulus bill.  It is exceedingly implausible that Barack Obama didn’t know about it, since he and his chief of staff were deeply involved in the issue.  I submit I have established that there was at least one earmark in the bill that Obama knew about, and so that his brag about an earmark free stimulus package was dishonest. 

I am not sure that there is anything wrong with earmarks, as a general rule.  But President Obama is on record to the contrary.  Nor do I think that complete honesty in budgeting is to be expected.  But it does mean that Obama is exactly what I thought he was, but a lot of his admirers don’t seem to know he was: a politician.  It also speaks to the seriousness of the Democrats in general and President Obama in particular: at a moment of apparent national peril, they see opportunities to bring home the bacon.  Nothing unusual here.  But it’s worth noting. 

Comments

[A Ha]

Let's see. Energy, energy development and clean energy development, construction, etc., along with health care and green industries, have been mentioned as production engines (read "jobs") for the near and far term. This is common sense, not a partisan plot. Someone's got to get that money. How does a near zero emission coal plant in Illinois not qualify? Surely there are politicians and people in South Dakota trying to figure out how to set up a suitable stimulus energy project there. If they succeed, does that mean they are "dirty"? I doubt anyone who gets a job with a new such industry will agree.

[Thomas Blakeslee]

It was dirty. The plant was killed because it wasn't economical. A real boondoggle. The DOE wanted to spend the money on other projects that might possibly have worked. This is pure pork.
http://ran.org/campaigns/global_finance/resources/the_dirty_truth_about_clean_coal/

[KB]

Dear A Ha:

"Clean coal" is opposed by most environmentalists, including Al Gore. This was an earmark, meant to benefit a Senator's state. Nothing more, nothing less.

[jkc]

i work for the Congressional Record, and let me tell you, everyone does this. every single Senator and Congressman, with a few exceptions - as far as i can tell McCain doesn't, and in the House, there are a few, but most notably a guy from Arizona named Jeff Flake. he regularly protests against the pork in all the spending bills...