GOP leaders keep Jeff Flake far away from their earmarks
February 19th, 2008, 6:32 pm · 1 Comment · posted by Paul Giblin
Jeff Flake
So much for all the talk by U.S. House Republicans about getting back to GOP ideology of limited spending.
The Republican Steering Committee had the chance to appoint pork-buster Jeff Flake to fill a vacant on the Appropriations Committee. Flake had promised to use the insider position to choke off earmarks.
Instead, the Steering Committee appointed Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama, who made no such promises. Bonner, like most members of both parties, regularly writes legislation to use federal funding for pet projects in his district.
Flake’s appointment was widely supported by taxpayer watchdog groups. Yet, the talk around the Capitol was that Flake would put the Republicans at a competitive disadvantage in reforming the earmark process, because he would have gutted GOP earmarks immediately.
That’s right, Republican leaders were afraid of spending less first. That kind of thinking only makes sense in Washington, D.C.
Then after giving Bonner the appointment, members of Congress adjourned for Presidents’ Day, which for them, requires more than a week.
February 20th, 2008 at 4:20 am
As Jeff Flake’s Democratic opponent, I, like everyone else, knew that he would not get this appointment. He is not respected by his Republican colleagues who threw him off the Judiciary Committee in the last Congress. According to statements, apparently House Minority Leader John Boehner will make sure the much-disliked Rep. Flake won’t get appointed next year either.
Jeff Flake spends enormous amounts of energy and time that he could be spending on the people’s business in his idée fixe to eliminate earmarks.
Of course, it gets him lots of time in the media so he can bad-mouth his colleagues and come off as pure and innocent and not as someone who never lifted a finger to help his constituents with funding for any needed projects in our district. (Rep. Bonner, who got the seat on the committee, obtained almost $17.3 million for 14 projects in his district.)
While accountability would be nice and the system undoubtedly needs to be fixed, he is wasting his Congressional salary obsessing about trivial amounts.
Por ejemplo, his latest “egregious earmark of the week” includes money for presidential libraries inluding this sum:
• $750,000 for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York
I can understand that Jeff Flake hates FDR for initiating programs like Social Security, unemployment insurance and workers protection that the Congressman wants to eliminate. But making a big deal out of $750,000?
If Jeff Flake had been in Congress during the Great Depression, he’d probably be wasting his time investigating the cost of dog food for Fala.
The $750,000 to the FDR library Jeff Flake is so upset about is what we spend on the disastrous Iraq war every seven and a half minutes — about how long it will take a brain-damaged “Make It Flake!” blogger to read this post.
How much money of the two billion dollars we spend on Iraq every week is accountable to oversight?
I’ve been to Hyde Park, and I trust the FDR presidential library to spend its funds a lot more than I do the idiots who brought us this misbegotten misadventure in Iraq.