Earlier this week, Red County contributor Media Lizzy interviewed Congressman Eric Cantor for her BlogTalkRadio show, Heading Right.Guerrilla House or Great Leadership? Yesterday, Members of the US House GOP defied Speaker Nancy Pelosi - even after she turned the lights off while Chief Deputy (Minority) Whip Eric Cantor, R-VA, was speaking. Congressman Cantor called in to discuss the Economic Crisis in America - and the American Energy Plan.
By Clare Venegas 
Prevent Earmarks in a Competitive Grant Program
Support the Flake Amendment to H.R. 1338, The Paycheck Fairness Act
Dear Colleague:
Later today, I will be offering a commonsense amendment to H.R. 1338, The Paycheck Fairness Act. In section five of the legislation, a new grant program is created to carry out programs to train girls and women in negotiating tactics. My amendment would simply prohibit the earmarking of funds authorized by this bill for the grant program. Earlier this year, a similar amendment was approved by the House of Representatives during consideration of the Beach Act of 2007 by a vote of 263 to 117 (Roll Call Vote #182, http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll182.xml).
The new grant program created in H.R. 1338 is explicitly authorized in the legislation to make grants on a competitive basis to eligible entities. However, when it comes to earmarking, the message is clear: just because Congress hasn't earmarked an account or a grant program before doesn't mean we won't in the future. My amendment makes no substantive change to the grant program included in the legislation and is simply offered as a safeguard against future earmarking.
With few opportunit[ies] this session to deal directly with the broken earmarking process, the least Members can do is explicitly prohibit earmarks in programs or accounts that are designed to provide funding on a formula or competitive basis. I urge my colleagues to support this commonsense amendment. For further information, please contact MacMillin Slobodien of my staff at x5-2635.
Sincerely,
Jeff Flake
Member of Congress
Taxpayers are shelling out over $17 billion for more than 11,000 Congressional earmarks in FY 2008. One such project is a $1.6 million earmark in this year's defense spending bill. The money is going to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), a program that searches for evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.
That alien pork project is just one example of how elected officials use earmarks to funnel federal tax dollars back to powerful interests in their districts. While politicians and a few of their most well-connected constituents benefit from earmarks, the costs fall on individual taxpayers. Since 1991, Americans have paid over $271 billion for pork projects.
In this new Reason.tv video, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla) - who is known as the Senate's "Dr. No" for his aggressive opposition to earmarks - explains how taxpayers are being fleeced by Washington's insatiable appetite for pork.
By Chip Hanlon @ GreenFaucet.com 
In the halls of the House, where business-as-usual means placing politics over common sense, Rep. Jeb Hensarling is a no-nonsense budget hawk who believes in a "radical" idea about federal spending - don't spend more than you take in. "Fiscal responsibility is one of our core values. Nobody expects the Democrats to be fiscally responsible. But if we're not fiscally responsible, I don't know how we ever get back into the majority."
Earmarks Persist in Spending Bills for 2009
June 27, 2008
By RON NIXON
WASHINGTON -- Despite a pledge by Congressional leaders to reduce pork-barrel projects, new information shows that both the number and amount of earmarks have increased in several spending bills now making their way through Congress.
The amount of the earmarks in the House version of the labor, health and human services appropriations bill for the 2009 fiscal year, for example, has jumped to $618.8 million from $277.9 million compared with the bill in 2008, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington.
In the Interior Department spending bill, earmarks increased to $134.9 million from $111 million from last year. Those amounts might change when the Appropriations Committee approves those bills. A spokeswoman from the committee said the number and amount of earmarks would be kept at 2008 levels.
A few years ago, the Department of Homeland Security bill had no earmarks; the new House bill has more than 100. In all, lawmakers requested 3,796 earmarks worth about $2.7 billion in seven spending bills.
The debate over earmarks has heated up in recent years after they figured into several Congressional scandals.
President Bush has threatened to veto spending bills if the number and cost of earmarks were not cut in half. Mr. Bush said that earmarks were wasteful and that the projects they financed typically lacked transparency and oversight.
The number of earmarks did decline last year after lawmakers, under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mandated that members publicly disclose their financing requests.
"But these increases we are seeing clearly sets back any steps toward reform," said Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste. "We're back to where we were before."
Supporters of the practice say Congress has the right to appropriate financing to organizations and programs that agencies might otherwise overlook. But Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona and a longtime critic of earmarks, said the budget process had become a spoils system.
"It's become a way for lawmakers to award the lobbyists and others who give to their campaigns," Mr. Flake said.
House Democrats lead the way in earmark requests worth billions of dollars in the seven bills for which information is available, according to a review of the data by The New York Times.
Representative Peter J. Visclosky, Democrat of Indiana and chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, requested more than $38 million in earmarks in the seven bills, including $850,000 for programs at a Y.M.C.A. in Gary, Ind.
Still oblivious to the source of our discontent, a number of free-spending Republicans recently rushed to meet House GOP leader John Boehner, urging him not to back an earmark reform proposal from the Republican Study Committee. The idea they fought so mightily against? A ban on earmark requests from Republican members of Congress for one year.
The porkers' struggle is typified by Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia--sponsor or co-sponsor of $83MM in earmarks in last year's budget alone--who, amazingly, defended earmarks as "being entrepreneurial about bringing something home."
In response to us on that remark, former Speaker Newt Gingrich scathingly replied, "There's nothing entrepreneurial about the Appropriations Committee spending other people's money."
Alas, bold GOP leadership on earmark reform is still nearly absent in Washington. Michigan's Thad McCotter highlights this by arguing the futility of fighting for earmark reform, saying members of the House can't lead on the issue because, "...we are not the field marshals, we are the foot soldiers."
Thank goodness Newt Gingrich suffered no such humility in 1994.
That's the view expressed in the Lincoln Club paper signed by Rich Wagner, the group's president, and Chip Hanlon, a board member. It deplores the refusal by party leaders to support a one-year moratorium on earmarks, whose 285 percent growth when Congress was under Republican control is "the perfect symbol of the GOP-led profligacy that drives us crazy still." Earmarks "epitomize the fiscal recklessness that led to Republicans becoming a minority in 2006. . . . It's no wonder the Republican leadership continued to fail on . . . entitlement reform and a reduction in federal spending."
The Lincoln Club blasts conservative Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, whose personal earmarks totaled $83 million last year, for defending his pork as "being entrepreneurial about bringing something home." It also assails conservative Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, a member of the leadership who has opposed earmark reform and voted on the floor against only one earmark. With his annual earmarks totaling $22.5 million, McCotter declared a year ago, "I will not unilaterally disarm my donor state."
On June 25, however, McCotter apparently felt enough heat to disarm unilaterally, with a surprise announcement that he had requested no earmarks this year. It may be too late for the 42-year-old third-termer, threatened with losing his House Republican Policy Committee chairmanship after only two years if the Lincoln Club of Orange County gets its clean sweep.
"We urge other Republican donor groups to reinforce this important beginning," read the club's ultimatum. It went on: "It is not credible to ask the American people to return Republicans to the majority when all we offer them is the same group of leaders and policies they so recently rejected."
The statement asserts that these leaders "have no idea what we say when we get together" and are "still oblivious to the source of our discontent." Now, if these contributors have their way, it is too late for the leaders, at least in the House. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who began his campaign for re-election in Kentucky by bragging about his earmarks for the state, probably has more to worry about from his Democratic election foe than insurgent Republican senators. But House Minority Leader John Boehner, who sponsors no earmarks himself but has not backed reform, faces an all-too-serious challenge.