SOTU: Not Holding My Breath on Earmark Transparency
Posted by Brett Davis - January 27, 2010My knee-jerk reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union speech this evening? I heard a few things I liked, some good ideas that didn’t go far enough, lots of things I disagreed 
with and several outright whoppers that would’ve made Tommy Flanagan—the pathological liar character played by Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live—blush. I also saw more evidence that the president continues to suffer from BBS (Blame Bush Syndrome). One other thing that caught my attention—besides a nice shot of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemingly nodding off at one point—was President Obama’s mention of earmarks.
Here’s what the president had to say: “I’m also calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform. You have trimmed some of this spending and embraced some meaningful change. But restoring the public trust demands more. For example, some members of Congress post some earmark requests online. Tonight, I’m calling on Congress to publish all earmark requests on a single website before there’s a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.”
While I applaud the president’s call for earmark transparency, I have to wonder if he’s just paying lip service to the issue. Color me skeptical for two reasons: 1) The president—who as a candidate pledged not to sign any bills with earmarks—signed into law last year an omnibus appropriation bill that contained a few earmarks, by which I mean more than 9,000 earmarks, and 2) I don’t think members of Congress—Republican or Democrat—are going to be eager to have their earmarks prominently displayed and easily accessible to the public on this newfangled InterWeb I’ve heard so much about.
Politicians are like vampires—they don’t like sunlight.
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