Sen. Harry Reid Vows Earmarks Will Return

So will Obama veto legislation that includes earmarks in it? If Democrats in the Senate hold firm, he might have to.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told ABC News that earmarks will return to Capitol Hill despite President Obama's vow in last night's State of the Union to veto any spending bill that includes them.
In an interview with ABC's Jonathan Karl, Reid launched a vigorous defense of pork, the pet projects that members of Congress insert into bills to benefit their home states.
"I think it's taking power away from the legislative branch of government and giving it to the executive branch of government," Reid said of the president's plan. "The executive branch of government is powerful enough and I think that I know more about what Nevada needs than some bureaucrat down on K Street."
"So you think the president is wrong about this?" Karl asked.
"Without any question," Reid replied.
"I understand it's great for an applause line, but it's really not solving anything to do with the deficit. It's only for show."
"So you're saying that earmarks will be back?" said Karl.
"Of course they'll be back," said Reid.
In addition to blasting Obama's anti-pork plan, the Nevada senator also sounded less than impressed with the president's proposed five-year spending freeze on discretionary spending.
"I'm not enthusiastic about it because it's not broad enough," Reid said. "We have to make sure that defense is included in that because certainly defense spending is getting bigger and bigger and bigger." . . .

Senators who voted to maintain earmarks

Republicans needed two more votes to maintain a filibuster on this issue. This is one reason that Murkowski's (R-AK) vote matters. Here is the list of Senators who voted to maintain earmarks:

Akaka (D-HI), Baucus (D-MT), Begich (D-AK), Bennett (R-UT), Bingaman (D-NM), Brown (D-OH), Cantwell (D-WA), Cardin (D-MD), Carper (D-DE), Casey (D-PA), Cochran (R-MS), Collins (R-ME), Conrad (D-ND), Coons (D-DE), Dodd (D-CT), Dorgan (D-ND), Durbin (D-IL), Feinstein (D-CA), Franken (D-MN), Gillibrand (D-NY), Hagan (D-NC), Harkin (D-IA), Inhofe (R-OK), Inouye (D-HI), Johnson (D-SD), Kerry (D-MA), Klobuchar (D-MN), Kohl (D-WI), Landrieu (D-LA), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Leahy (D-VT), Levin (D-MI), Lieberman (ID-CT), Lincoln (D-AR), Lugar (R-IN), Manchin (D-WV), Menendez (D-NJ), Merkley (D-OR), Murkowski (R-AK), Murray (D-WA), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Rockefeller (D-WV), Sanders (I-VT), Schumer (D-NY), Shelby (R-AL), Specter (D-PA), Stabenow (D-MI), Tester (D-MT), Udall (D-NM), Voinovich (R-OH), Webb (D-VA), Whitehouse (D-RI), Wyden (D-OR)

More earmarks from Congress

Obama: "And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely. But the fact is that eliminating earmarks alone is not a recipe for how we're going to get the middle class back on track." Now the new spending bill just passed by Congress has this.

Getting into the holiday spirit, the House of Representatives on Thursday approved a spending bill loaded with goodies for the folks back home.

Trails for Monterey Bay. An arts pavilion for Mississippi. Bus shelters for Bellflower.

In all, the bill contains 5,224 earmarks costing about $3.9 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group. . . .

The $447-billion bill, which passed the Democratic-controlled House with no Republican votes and moved to the Senate, combines six spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1.

The measure brings total earmarks in this year's spending bills to 7,577 at a cost of about $6 billion, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense. The Pentagon spending bill, the last of the annual appropriations bills, is expected to contain more earmarks than the omnibus bill, said Steve Ellis of the taxpayer group. . . .

So much for ending earmarks: What happened with the Cap & Trade Bill

From the Washington Times:

When House Democratic leaders were rounding up votes Friday for the massive climate-change bill, they paid special attention to their colleagues from Ohio who remained stubbornly undecided.

They finally secured the vote of one Ohioan, veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Toledo, the old-fashioned way. They gave her what she wanted - a new federal power authority, similar to Washington state's Bonneville Power Administration, stocked with up to $3.5 billion in taxpayer money available for lending to renewable energy and economic development projects in Ohio and other Midwestern states.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, included the Kaptur project in a 310-page amendment to the legislation unveiled at 3 a.m. Friday, just hours before the bill was to be debated on the House floor. The amendment was packed with other vote-getting provisions, both large and small, that had been sought by dozens of wavering Democrats. . . . .

Thanks to Tony Troglio for this link.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — As the most ambitious energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress made its way to a floor vote last Friday, it grew fat with compromises, carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts intended to win the votes of wavering lawmakers and the support of powerful industries.

The deal making continued right up until the final minutes, with the bill’s co-author Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, doling out billions of dollars in promises on the House floor to secure the final votes needed for passage.

The bill was freighted with hundreds of pages of special-interest favors, even as environmentalists lamented that its greenhouse-gas reduction targets had been whittled down.

Some of the prizes were relatively small, like the $50 million hurricane research center for a freshman lawmaker from Florida.

Others were huge and threatened to undermine the environmental goals of the bill, like a series of compromises reached with rural and farm-state members that would funnel billions of dollars in payments to agriculture and forestry interests.

Automakers, steel companies, natural gas drillers, refiners, universities and real estate agents all got in on the fast-moving action.

The biggest concessions went to utilities, which wanted assurances that they could continue to operate and build coal-burning power plants without shouldering new costs. The utilities received not only tens of billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, but also billions for work on technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from coal combustion to help meet future pollution targets.

That deal, negotiated by Representative Rick Boucher, a conservative Democrat from Virginia’s coal country, won the support of the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry lobby, and lawmakers from regions dependent on coal for electricity. . . . .

So much for Obama's promise to eliminate earmarks

Congressmen don't to find requirement that they post their earmark requests much of a burden. Apparently, the earmark process isn't over.

Dozens of House members have buried their earmark requests on their official Web sites, technically complying with a new rule -- but just barely.

The half-hearted effort comes after members were required to post earmark requests online - with details about the recipient, amount and purpose.

The Hill newspaper reported that while some lawmakers are making a genuine effort to advertise their earmarks, dozens have not. The newspaper reported that many requests could only be found by scrolling through different categories and looking in hard-to-reach digital spaces.

Taxpayers for Common Sense has been tracking the Web sites and said 64 lawmakers had not established any accessible links to their earmarks more than 72 hours after the deadline. They noted that 31 members do not request earmarks.

Pelosi told Obama that the earmarks were to stay in the Stimulus bill

While Obama told the country that there were no earmarks in the stimulus bill, Pelosi was telling him that she wasn't going to remove earmarks from the bill. John Fund has this from the WSJ Political Diary today:

Ms. Pelosi, for her part, let it be known in a recent meeting with the president that his requests to hold down the number of earmarked pork-barrel projects were encroaching unacceptably on Congressional prerogatives. "We are reducing them, but members still want them," she told the president, according a Democratic insider's account related to the Web site Politico.com.