Free Republic

n his New York Times bestselling book, Throw Them All Out, Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer revealed how members of Congress enrich themselves and their relatives using earmarks and insider information. Now, the Washington Post, following in Schweizer’s footsteps, has conducted a study that found 16 members of Congress have used their power of the purse to benefit companies, colleges, and community groups tied to their relatives. *snip* Among those cited in the Washington Post report were the following (below):

Rick Santorum's taken a large lead in Michigan's upcoming Republican primary. He's at 39% to 24% for Mitt Romney, 12% for Ron Paul, and 11% for Newt Gingrich. Santorum's rise is attributable to two major factors: his own personal popularity (a stellar 67/23 favorability) and GOP voters increasingly souring on Gingrich. Santorum's becoming something closer and closer to a consensus conservative candidate as Gingrich bleeds support. Santorum's winning an outright majority of the Tea Party vote with 53% to 22% for Romney and 10% for Gingrich. He comes close to one with Evangelicals as well at 48% to 20% for...

In his New York Times bestselling book, Throw Them All Out, Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer revealed how members of Congress enrich themselves and their relatives using earmarks and insider information. Now, the Washington Post, following in Schweizer’s footsteps, has conducted a study that found 16 members of Congress have used their power of the purse to benefit companies, colleges, and community groups tied to their relatives...

The announcements flowed out of Rick Santorum’s Senate office: a $3.5 million federal grant to Piasecki Aircraft to help it test a new helicopter propeller technology; another $3.5 million to JLG Industries to bolster its bid to build all-terrain forklifts for the military; $1.4 million to Medico Industries to upgrade equipment for its munitions work. [snip]

Don’t think that Mitt Romney didn’t notice the Rick Santorum hat trick on Tuesday, despite his protestations that those races didn’t amount to much anyway. His team seems to have executed a ballet like pivot in only 24 hours, abandoning his attacks on Newt Gingrich and training his sights on the former Pennsylvania Senator. For those of use lashed to the presidential press train, this quickly became apparent in our e-mail in boxes. I awoke this morning to find a love note from Mitt, once again proclaiming his bona fides as a “Washington outsider� and leading with the following graphic.The...

Borrowing a page from Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer’s investigation of how elected officials funnel taxpayer dollars to projects that increase the value of properties they own, the Washington Post has conducted a study revealing that 33 members of Congress earmarked more than $300 million for projects within two miles of land they own...

Ron Paul is believed to be a “fiscal conservative” and if you ask him he will tell you that he has never voted for an earmark. That statement is 100% correct. What Paul does is to make sure that the earmarks he wants are put into a bill, and then he votes against the bill. Its the best of all possible worlds. He gets to bring home the bacon on a local basis and makes the anti-earmark claim on a national basis. In fiscal 2009 Ron Paul sponsored or co-sponsored 23 earmarks totaling $80,775,750 ranking him the 33rd highest out...

In a recent column, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker declared Rep. Ron Paul “a consistent champion of smaller government” who votes against “virtually every piece of legislation that could be interpreted as government overreach or interference with the free market.” There one small problem with the analysis: It ignores the fact that Paul is one of the biggest pork-barrel earmarkers on Capitol Hill. The Texas Republican defends his record, telling Fox News’s Neil Cavuto in a 2009 interview that “earmarks is the responsibility of the Congress. We should earmark even more.” And besides, he explained, he votes “no” on all...

In Iowa, in the days leading up to the caucus, one political radio spot was particularly ubiquitous: a game-show-style ad from the Perry campaign that blasted Rick Santorum’s earmark history. When the announcer in the ad asks which GOP contender supported the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, “Susie from Des Moines” answers, “Santorum.” “Correct!” the announcer bellows. “Santorum voted for the Bridge to Nowhere and a highway bill full of pork.” Perry’s campaign isn’t the only one ready to jump on Santorum’s earmark record. Sen. John McCain said in a CNN interview yesterday, e-mailed by the Romney camp to reporters, that...

So it continues, this scrutiny under which Santorum now happily campaigns. (Yes, “happily.� He sounded ecstatic to be able to legitimately target Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as his competition at his first event in New Hampshire yesterday.)So far, most of the criticisms sound like this: Santorum is of the big government, compassionate breed of conservative — and as much a part of the Republican establishment as Mitt Romney. Santorum’s earmark-laden voting record from his time in the Senate is an easy piece of evidence to prop up this idea.But, if these excerpts from an appearance at a Press Club...

With just over 24 hours before the Iowa caucuses, Texas Governor Rick Perry's campaign has produced a blistering web video highlighting former Senator Rick Santorum's passion for pork and his history as a big government big spender. The 60 second spot also draws the comparison between Mr. Santorum and 2008's Candidate Barack Obama - both in favor of wasteful spending and neither with any executive experience - the ad describes them as too close for comfort.

Evangelicals are in a civil war in Iowa. If they could unite behind a candidate, they could defeat Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in the Iowa caucuses, but they can’t. Part of the problem is that three candidates are running for evangelical support but Iowa simply isn’t big enough for the three of them. They’re splitting the vote. Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum are all making a play for the social conservatives they need to propel them onward. In 2008, sixty percent of the participants in the Iowa caucuses were evangelical. Eight days ago Rick Santorum won the...

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said Thursday that he's "proud" of the money he brought back to his state by way of earmarks, rebuffing new attacks by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Santorum said that if he were elected president, he would oppose earmarks -- the process by which a lawmaker directs spending to a particular project -- because Congress had placed a temporary moratorium on the practice. But he didn't back down from new attacks this morning by Perry, who labeled the surging Santorum a "prolific earmarker," and launched a radio ad, to boot, echoing that charge. "If you look...

One of the odd things I hear about from time to time from many of my libertarian colleagues and friends is their perception that Texas Republican Ron Paul is a rare model of purity in a political pigsty. I have many issues of agreement with Paul, particularly on health policy, and I've defended him publicly in the past on many of his calls for government reform. But this perception of Paul as a principled crusader who serves only the Constitution is at odds with his wholehearted embrace of typical pork-barrel politics - a difference which is all the more stark...

Glenn Beck Smears Ron Paul With Half-Truths About Paul's Earmarks. Today on his radio show Glenn Beck and his staff declared that Ron Paul is the "earmark king", and labeled Paul a hypocrit. Beck correctly stated that Paul adds many earmarks to spending bills, and then votes against the spending bills. What Beck left out (either by deceit or by ignorance) is that earmarks do not increase the size of a budget. The money allocated for a budget is set by the Appropriations Committee prior to any allocation or earmark. All money not allocated or earmarked is not deleted from...

Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer's explosive new expose, has pulled back the lid on congressional insider trading, revealing the shocking regularity with which elected officials use their legislative positions to reap financial rewards. This 'honest' graft is by no means limited to using inside knowledge to play the stock market. Schweizer, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, reports that members of Congress are also making a killing in real estate, using federal funds to boost their personal land holdings. Like Congress's questionable trading practices, mixing real estate investments with taxpayer money is technically legal. Actually, it's pretty easy...

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was one of only four House Republicans to break rank from the party and request earmarks despite a Republican Conference earmark moratorium. Paul sent 41 earmark requests totaling $157,093,544 for the 2011 Fiscal Year. His largest single request was $19,500,000 for a naval training ship at the Texas Maritime Academy in Galveston, followed by a $18,126,000 to provide maintenance on the Matagorda Ship Channel. For Fiscal Year 2010, Paul requested 54 total earmarks, adding up to $398,460,640 in pork that the former presidential candidate sought to bring home to his district. These requests were made...

One of the lies Ron Paul's more vocal supporters (his army of cyberstormtroopers) will tell you until they're blue in the face is that the Shame of Texas has a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. They'll hiss, scratch, and burn a cross on your blog for daring to point out the obvious. In other words, they're like Chairman Obama's Drones, big on fascisti passion, small on critical thinking. Let's take a stroll down Memory Hole Lane, shall we ? Here is the text of Ayatollah RuPaul's interview with Neil Cavuto of FOX News back in 2009: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEIL CAVUTO,...

Today Perry speaks of Washington as an alien land, inhabited by irresponsible politicians. In his most recent book, Fed Up!, Perry criticizes President George W. Bush for giving free rein to “spendthrift congressional Republicans.” “Ultimately, the record is fairly unforgiving for Republicans — particularly in Congress — who have been in power in Washington over the last decade or so,” Perry wrote in 2010. “They haven’t just spent our money wildly — they have blatantly ignored our core founding principles.” This is the same message that Perry has brought to the campaign trail since the announcement of his bid for...

When it comes to Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party rhetoric doesn’t always match the record. Should she launch a serious bid for president, Bachmann would likely find herself defending a slew of questionable votes and decisions, including on earmarks, pardons and farm subsidies.

The Defense Authorization Bill that was voted out of committee on Wednesday brought back to life an expensive earmark that has plagued taxpayers for years – the F136 alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. The second engine line has been opposed by both President Bush and President Obama, is unwanted and unneeded by the Pentagon and has been rejected by both chambers of Congress. Already having cost $3 billion in taxpayer funds, the earmark was thought to have finally been laid to rest last month – its reinsertion in to the 2012 Defense bill signals this may not be...

(CBS/AP)  Details of the $38 billion worth of spending cuts factoring in last Friday's 11th-hour budget that averted a government shutdown have been released, but the cuts, while historic, were significantly eased by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway. [Snip] Many of the cuts appear to have been cuts in name only, because they came from programs that had unspent funds. For example, $1.7 billion left over from the 2010 census; $3.5 billion in unused children's health insurance funds; $2.2 billion in subsidies for...

While President Obama calls Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi a threat to his own people, just one month before attacking Libya the president asked Congress to increase U.S. aid for Qaddafi's military to $1.7 million. According to State Department figures, the money was earmarked to train Libyan military officers, improve its air force, secure its borders and to counter terrorism. If this seems contradictory, welcome to the world of U.S. foreign aid, where billions of tax dollars go to people we don't like and nations some say don't need the help. The latest unrest has drawn renewed scrutiny to these policies....

In the week of March 7, the House will take up bills addressing the U.S. housing crisis, while the Senate will resume debate on reforming U.S. procedures for awarding patents. HOUSE HIGHWAY, MASS-TRANSIT PROJECTS: Voting 421-4, the House sent the Senate a bill (HR 662) to provide billions of dollars in funding for road and bridge construction, mass transit, and highway safety from March 4 through Sept. 30. A yes vote was to pass the bill. Judy Biggert: Yes Randy Hultgren: Yes “BRIDGE TO NOWHERE”: Voting 181-246, the House defeated a Democratic bid to strip HR 662 (above) of funds...

WASHINGTON (AP) — First-term Republican Rep. Tim Scott of Charleston, S.C., says he's looking for "any way in the world" to get federal money to expand his hometown's aging harbor. It's the one way he won't pursue that's making some South Carolinians angry. Scott, like his state's famously conservative senator, Jim DeMint, is among a new breed of tea party-backed conservatives who have sworn off "earmarks" — the pet projects that lawmakers can write into spending bills for their districts. He won't ask for one, won't support one, doesn't even want to talk about it. His opposition to earmarks helped...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-02-14-budgetinside14_ST_N.htm?csp=34news For five years running, two presidents have tried to eliminate funding for a backup engine on a fighter jet, a program Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls unnecessary. Congress, however, has rebuffed the White House and continues to fund the $465-million-a-year alternate engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, amid intense lobbying by General Electric, the corporate giant working with Rolls-Royce to develop that engine. General Electric's aggressive outreach ranges from running ads on the subway cars that congressional staffers take to work to deploying dozens of well-connected lobbyists to Capitol Hill and the Pentagon.... ...Among the new lawmakers backing...

Both of Alaska's senators said Tuesday they were disappointed the top Senate appropriator was calling for a moratorium on earmarking, the practice that has directed billions of dollars in federal spending to Alaska. Democratic Sen. Mark Begich and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski both said they agree there's a need to cut federal spending, but neither thinks an end to earmarks is the way to do it. "I have said many times before, Alaska is a young state with many needs, and we deserve our fair share of federal funding to develop our resources and our infrastructure," Begich said. Murkowksi, who...

Harry Reid told ABC’s Jonathan Karl President Obama is wrong when it comes to his supposed ‘earmark ban’ promised during his State of the Union address. Reid says he already has enough power- and thinks he’s trying to undercut the power of congress. “I think it’s taking power away from the legislative branch of government and giving it to the executive branch of government,” Reid said of the president’s plan. “The executive branch of government is powerful enough and I think that I know more about what Nevada needs than some bureaucrat down on K Street”, Reid said.

For a Marxist like Barack Obama changing his basic nature is really not possible. It is in his DNA and the only way to successfully deal with him is to remember he is a liar who will say anything to get his way. In the lead up to his election Obama frequently spoke against “earmarks”, and actually became a co-sponsor of Senator Jim DeMint’s bill to ban earmarks. Taking this position helped ….and eased his way to election. Nevertheless, immediately upon taking office Obama signed an Omnibus spending bill packed with 9000 earmarks costing $5 billion, most of which were...

President Barack Obama picked a fight Tuesday with his Senate Democratic colleagues over earmarks – and he’s well-positioned to win this battle against the parochial projects. After Obama surprised lawmakers in his State of the Union address with a bold threat to veto all bills with earmarks, Democrats in the Senate grew visibly frustrated, denouncing the president’s call as a power grab that’ll have little-to-no impact on the federal budget deficit. But the reality is that Democrats face a political climate that makes it virtually impossible to get any earmarks through this Congress if Obama and Republicans in Congress maintain...

Pursuing a path of deficit reduction and government reform, President Obama will tonight in his State of the Union address call for a ban on earmarks and he will propose a five year budget freeze on non-security related discretionary spending, ABC News has learned. The proposals come as the president prepares to tackle the deficit and debt and as he faces a House of Representatives in Republican hands, many of whose members include those affiliated with the Tea Party who may be willing to embrace both moves. The president will propose some new spending in certain areas that address the...

Most of my Republican brethren are celebrating the House’s vote to repeal Obamacare but I think it was a colossal waste of time. They say it was a moral victory and sets the tone for the new Congress...

College administrators continually cry poor, particularly to reporters and congressional representatives, but the federal government lays more largesse on them than most of us have seen. “The next fiscal year will also be difficult because the $54-billion in federal stimulus funds meant to shore up education spending will be gone,” Eric Kelderman reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 7, 2011. “In fact, many states used up those allocations in the 2010 budget cycle.” One conduit for such cash is the National Science Foundation. “The National Science Foundation funds research and education in most fields of science and...

WELCH — The ongoing debate in Washington over the use of federal earmarks could be a bad omen for the Coalfields Expressway and the King Coal Highway, according to project supporters. “As far as earmarks in general, I cannot for the life of me figure out why any congressman or senator would want to stop earmarks,” Sen. Richard Browning, D-Wyoming, a long-time supporter of the Coalfields Expressway project in southern West Virginia, said. “Less than 1 percent of the federal budget goes for earmarks. If they can’t bring money home for special projects, we have to rely upon bureaucrats in...

The Congressional Pig Book is CAGW's annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. The 2010 Pig Book identified 9,129 projects at a cost of $16.5 billion in the 12 Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2010. A "pork" project is a line-item in an appropriations bill that designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. To qualify as pork, a project must meet one of seven criteria that were developed in 1991 by CAGW and the Congressional Porkbusters Coalition. The 2010 Congressional Pig Book Summary gives a snapshot of each appropriations bill and details...

Members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus may tout their commitment to cutting government spending now, but they used the 111th Congress to request hundreds of earmarks that, taken cumulatively, added more than $1 billion to the federal budget. [ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ] According to a Hotline review of records compiled by Citizens Against Government Waste, the 52 members of the caucus, which pledges to cut spending and reduce the size of government, requested a total of 764 earmarks valued at $1,049,783,150 during Fiscal Year 2010, the last year for which...

"...the Center for Public Integrity has discovered that lawmakers, instead of going through the congressional earmark process, have written directly to federal departments with backdoor requests for stimulus funds. It's a practice known as lettermarking, says John Solomon, an investigative journalist for the center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group."

111th Congress Added More Debt Than First 100 Congresses Combined: $10,429 Per Person in U.S. Monday, December 27, 2010 By Terence P. Jeffrey (CNSNews.com) - The federal government has accumulated more new debt--$3.22 trillion ($3,220,103,625,307.29)—during the tenure of the 111th Congress than it did during the first 100 Congresses combined, according to official debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury. That equals $10,429.64 in new debt for each and every one of the 308,745,538 people counted in the United States by the 2010 Census. The total national debt of $13,858,529,371,601.09 (or $13.859 trillion), as recorded by the U.S. Treasury at...

Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond isn't going quietly. In his final days as a U.S. senator before retiring, Bond marched repeatedly to the Senate floor to deliver policy addresses on matters ranging from energy to national security to global trade. He even made a speech entitled "Rare Earth," a lesson on the strategic value of metallic elements in Missouri's soil. He recently introduced a bill to spend $50 million to secure a rare earth supply chain — even though he won't be in the Senate to shepherd it. On Dec. 14, Bond, R-Mo., stood to deliver his farewell address, a panoramic...

Put Up, or Shut Up!- By: Larry Walker, Jr. -Okay, it’s time for all you rich whiners (a.k.a. Anthony Weiner) and cry babies to man up. For those who think that a top federal tax rate of 35% is too low, there is a solution. How about forking over some of that excess lucre? How about putting your money where your mouth is? The time to stand up for your convictions has come. It’s time to make a voluntary donation towards the national debt.If you meet all of the following criteria, then I’m talking to you: You don’t like the...

When Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill recently went to war over the budget, press coverage suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, both parties remain equal-opportunity earmarkers. It's not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for the still-unpassed 2011 budget, and...

How does a Senate leader one spin a defeat like night’s Democratic retreat on the budget omnibus bill? If you are Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the answer can be summed up in one word: furiously. After Reid was forced to pull the omnibus spending bill after Republican objections to its more than $16 billion in earmarked pork, his office released the following statement (not online at presstime). It argued that Thursday was a Republican rout.

The defeat last night of the OmniPorkulus bill, as the Boss Emeritus calls it, gives us a chance to revisit the long-held — and long-true — belief that both parties are equally addicted to pork-barrel spending. That certainly proved true enough when Republicans held power, as earmarks skyrocketed and both parties squealed with delight at the trough. However, a new study by a coalition of of watchdog groups on the FY2011 budget proposal shows that one party has made great strides in weaning itself from K Street slop in the past year — and it’s not the Democrats, as Byron...

Some Americans might be under the impression that they just watched a lame duck Congress engage in a lame-o budget fight. But Senate Republicans' stunning defeat last night of the Democrats' omnibus spending bill was anything but boring. What our great nation just watched was the Democratic Party preview its political strategy for the next two years. It also watched a united Senate GOP defeat that approach, though not before a handful of Republicans considered walking straight into the Democratic trap. The whole episode was an early peek at the GOP's biggest challenge going forward. That challenge is, as it...

Harry Reid said that Obama is ‘stealing power‘, and the solution is to load up on more earmarks. According to Reid, they have a Constitutional duty to do ‘congressional spending.’

The gold standard in contemptuous politics remains emperor Caligula's appointment of his horse, Incitatus, to the Roman senate. Well, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is getting some long delayed senatorial payback. Figuratively speaking, Reid plans to drop on the president's desk a steaming pile of what Incitatus used to deposit on the stable floor. This sack of non-shinola goes by the technical name of an omnibus spending bill. It wraps together all of the appropriations bills of the last year into a single $1.2 trillion monstrosity so laden down with spending grotesqueries that it comes out to more than $623 million a...

Preparing for a final showdown on the massive $1.1 trillion spending bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid defended the thousands of earmarks in the measure as the basic function of Congress. "That's our job. That's what we're supposed to do," Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, said as he chastised fellow senators who, while having requested pork-barrel spending earlier this year, are now decrying their inclusion in the spending bill.

Hello all. I am on Cspan but nobody is reading the bill. I thought Demint was forcing that? Heard that they would start reading at 6pm. Please enlight me. Thanks.

It took two days to print and it will take even longer to read. According to The Hill, Senate Republicans are going through with a plan to have the entire omnibus spending bill read on the Senate floor, a feat that won’t be completed for 50 hours. Republicans have vowed to vote against the 1,924-page, $1.1 trillion bill that is loaded with billions in earmarks. “Senate clerks are expected to read the massive bill in rotating shifts around the clock — taking breaks to drink water and pop throat lozenges — to keep legislative business on track, according to a...

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) was one of only four House Republicans to break rank from the party and request earmarks despite a Republican Conference earmark moratorium. Paul sent 41 earmark requests totaling $157,093,544 for the 2011 Fiscal Year. His largest single request was $19,500,000 for a naval training ship at the Texas Maritime Academy in Galveston, followed by a $18,126,000 to provide maintenance on the Matagorda Ship Channel. For Fiscal Year 2010, Paul requested 54 total earmarks, adding up to $398,460,640 in pork that the former presidential candidate sought to bring home to his district. These requests were made...