{"id":9723,"date":"2007-01-24T16:30:02","date_gmt":"2007-01-24T21:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9723.html"},"modified":"2007-01-24T16:30:02","modified_gmt":"2007-01-24T21:30:02","slug":"what-earmarks-and-signing-statements-have-in-common","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/what-earmarks-and-signing-statements-have-in-common\/","title":{"rendered":"What earmarks and signing statements have in common"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s one paragraph<\/a> from last night’s State of the Union address that’s been bugging me all day:<\/p>\n

“Next, there is the matter of earmarks. These special interest items are often slipped into bills at the last hour — when not even C-SPAN is watching. In 2005 alone, the number of earmarks grew to over 13,000 and totaled nearly $18 billion. Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate — they are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn’t vote them into law. I didn’t sign them into law. Yet, they’re treated as if they have the force of law. The time has come to end this practice.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the substance of the comment, Bush’s complaint about earmarks was merely hypocritical. As TP noted<\/a>, Bush has “engaged in his own earmarking, using the federal budget process to ‘reward political supporters, campaign contributors and sometimes members of Congress’ for votes on a presidential priority. Unlike with appropriations bills, you have no way to know whether an executive earmark ‘comes from some agency’s discretionary fund, and they decide to put it in some key district or state’ for political gain.” In other words, it’s not as if the president has the moral high ground here.<\/p>\n

But there’s something else. The president was decrying these extra-legal provisions — which sound an awful lot like his signing statements. Lawmakers don’t “vote them into law”; Bush doesn’t “sign them into law”; and yet “they’re treated as if they have the force of law.”<\/p>\n

Hasn’t the time come to end this<\/i> practice?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s one paragraph from last night’s State of the Union address that’s been bugging me all day: “Next, there is the matter of earmarks. These special interest items are often slipped into bills at the last hour — when not even C-SPAN is watching. In 2005 alone, the number of earmarks grew to over 13,000 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}