The Senate's two biggest sponsors of this year's pet spending projects are Mr. Stevens of Alaska and Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, both Republicans, according to preliminary reviews of fiscal 2008 spending bills by nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense. Two of the House's three biggest claimants of earmarks also are Republicans: C.W. Bill Young of Florida and Jerry Lewis of California, the group found.
Their continued success at steering billions of taxpayer dollars to their constituents is all the more impressive — or arguably hypocritical — because President Bush and other prominent Republicans sharpened their criticisms of earmarks after Democrats took over the House and Senate majorities in January.
Given that these Republicans have been outraged by the "bloated" budgets of the Democratic majority, perhaps they could have sacrificed their 40% of the pork pie so that some of these other priorities (see SCHIP or the Iraq War) could have been more affordable.
Another bit of contention is the constant brow beating of the Democrats by this Republican President:
Congressional leaders "have not made enough progress" in curbing earmarks, Mr. Bush said. He said his budget director will "review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill."
Democrats this year shed more light on the earmarking process and reduced its overall cost. Still, about 9,000 earmarks costing $7.4 billion are in the final spending measure.
because Republican reforms brought more transparency to the budget, taxpayers can now see and scrutinize just how their hard to come by money is being spent, even when Democrats put their budgets together in the dead of night earlier this week.
