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Didn’t Obama Promise NO Earmarks?

During the campaign for the presidency John McCain attacked the earmark process. McCain was in a good position to do so since he has used earmarks little, if at all. Barack Obama was one of the big time spenders with earmarks but he stopped using them because they were a liability. Then he took the same tough stance as McCain.

Just before Obama took office he promised an end to earmarks. He said he would not sign bills with earmarks in them and he specifically said that the stimulus would have NO earmarks. Remember, he was the guy bringing a new kind of politics to DC (the Chicago way, perhaps).

On his second day in Washington, President-elect Obama met with his budget team and promised no earmarks will be in the stimulus plan.

“We are going to ban all earmarks — the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review,” he explained. “We will create an economic recovery oversight board made up of key administration officials and independent advisors [sic] to identify problems early and make sure we are doing all we can to solve it.” MSNBC First Read Jan 6, 2009

The stimulus passed and it had earmarks in it. PolitiFact reports that they were there but only a small number. Maybe I am being too literal but “No earmarks” means NONE to me, not a small number of them.

Then the omnibus bill was passed and it had a ton of earmarks. There were nearly 9000 earmarks in that bill and Obama, the one who was going to end the earmark process, signed it. But that was only once and we will get it right from now on.

The Congress just passed a 1.1 trillion dollar spending bill and Obama signed it. So how did the guy who was going to end earmarks do on this one?

There were 5000 earmarks in this bill totaling 3.9 billion dollars.

This is a disgrace. It is bad enough when earmarks are added during good times but this country is on life support and we are out of money. We are borrowing money from China to pay our bills and the annual interest we pay on the loans is enough to completely fund several government agencies for the entire year. Adding earmarks to a bill when we are in such a bad way financially is irresponsible and demonstrates a complete disregard for our financial well being. It is wrong and Obama should have vetoed it.

Instead, he broke his promise and signed the bill, earmarks and all.

Another broken promise.

How is that Hope and Change working out for ya?

Related:
NPR

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