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“EARMARK LIMITATION AMENDMENT” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Commerce was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H6551-H6552 on July 15, 2008.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
EARMARK LIMITATION AMENDMENT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, every year now we hear a lot of high-minded rhetoric about earmarks and how earmarks represent Congress' Article I authority, that we earmark in Congress because we have the power of the purse and we are simply exercising that power.
But the reality belies that claim. Let me talk about one earmark tonight that will give just an example of how this high-minded rhetoric that we often hear is so wrong.
We may not even get appropriation bills on the floor this year. We may not have any. It may be that we simply do a continuing resolution to fund appropriations for the next fiscal year; and then in January have a big omnibus bill and all of the earmarks, the thousands that have been put as part of the bill that we haven't even seen on the House floor, will be dumped into the bill.
So all we can do, I guess, is come to the floor in a forum like this when we are not even officially challenging the earmarks, but to highlight what a waste some of these earmarks are.
This earmark that I want to talk about tonight is $200,000 in funding for the Advantage West Economic Development Group's Certified Entrepreneurial Community Program in North Carolina. There are a number of earmarks similar to this in the Labor-HHS bill which we won't see later this year. These are funds set aside for economic development, business incubators and workforce programs.
I would never argue, nor would any of us in our campaign literature, that this is a proper role and function of government. Yet we see time and again earmark after earmark to fund these kinds of programs.
This is not the first time I have challenged an earmark for this specific group. In fact, last year I came to the floor and argued that this group need not have Federal funds to carry out its objective. I say this because Advantage West Economic Development Group's Website has a long list of corporate sponsors, including BB&T, BellSouth, Qualcomm, Sprint, UBS, Verizon and Wachovia. In addition to more than 80 corporate sponsors listed, the group also counts the National Park Service, National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Department of Commerce as ``funding partners.''
On top of that, the group received a $282,000 earmark in last year's appropriation bill.
So why in the world, Mr. Speaker, with so much financial support coming here should this group receive an additional subsidy? It simply makes no sense at all.
I think that we ought to mention here, as was mentioned in the July 9 issue of Roll Call, that we often hear that earmarks are given out because Members know their districts much better than faceless bureaucrats in some department.
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But why is it, then, if there is such a noble purpose for earmarks, and the Members are simply knowing their district and getting these districts, why is there such a disproportionate allocation of earmarks? Why are so many going to leadership or so-called vulnerable Members on one side.
Why are earmarks given out to Members who are at risk of losing their election? According to a Roll Call article just a few days ago, it said that ``Sixteen Democrats in the `Frontline' program, aimed at protecting the 29 most vulnerable House Democrats, secured $810,000 worth of earmarks each'' in the Labor-HHS bill. This is not a one-sided effort. It's not just the Democrats, it's my party as well.
The article went on to say, ``Among the 23 Republican incumbents participating in the `Regain Our Majority Program' this cycle, 14 secured $900,000 or more in the Labor-HHS bill.
``Twelve of those--the Republicans pulled down $1 million or more in the CJS bill, with 8 of them securing $1.5 million each.''
Again, why is it, after we hear all this lofty rhetoric about earmarks, because we know our constituents best, why is it that the only ones that really know their constituents best are those who are at risk of not being re-elected back to this body? It simply doesn't make sense. It cheapens this institution. We are a better institution than that, and we should, we should respect this institution more than that and respect taxpayers' money more than that.
Also, another reason that's often given for earmarks is that we need to provide oversight. Earmarking is a way to provide oversight, because, after all, we know better than those bureaucrats on how to spend money.
I asked the Congressional Research Service to do a little research to see where the actual oversight in Congress has gone since the contemporary practice of earmarking has really started in the mid-
1990s. If you look at the 104th Congress, we just had--not very many earmarks. By the time we got to the 109th Congress, we were up around, I think, the final numbers were about 15,000 earmarks. Yet the oversight hearings actually go down. That's not a legitimate reason for earmarking.
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