I've obviously found today's theme.
WASHINGTON — In a direct challenge to Congress and the way it does business, the White House on Wednesday unveiled an online list of all the pet spending projects lawmakers tucked in the federal budget for the 2004-05 fiscal year.
The Internet database details spending known as earmarks, funds that lawmakers funnel to projects, programs and sometimes even specific recipients without going through the normal budget review — such as the $25 million provided to California spinach farmers in the recent Iraq spending bill.The amount of earmarked money has tripled in the last decade. And in early January, just as Democrats were taking power, President Bush challenged Congress to halve the number and amount of earmarks, from a record $19 billion in fiscal 2005.
"You didn't vote them into law. I didn't sign them into law. Yet they are treated as if they have the force of law," Bush said in his State of the Union address. "The time has come to end this practice."
The database, which allows the public to search for earmarks by state and by agency but not by name of the sponsoring lawmaker, is the most comprehensive list produced by the government. But Democrats pointed out Wednesday that it did not include the earmarks the president and his administration requested....
The database, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb , lacks some information considered vital by activists. It is only for fiscal 2005 and does not give the name of the lawmaker behind the earmark.
It also does not include any earmarks requested by the administration. As a result, it contains fewer earmarks than some other sources. For example, the Congressional Research Service found $48 billion in earmarks in its review.
Some of those deficiencies will be addressed next year when congressionally authorized earmark disclosure data are released.
Did they really not think anyone would notice this?
This whole project just seems stupid and juvenile. If you're going to build a database, make it complete. If the White House doesn't want to do that, someone else will. In fact, the Congress has already passed a law that will make that happen next year. If the White House had genuinely cared about this issue, they would have made their version of the database complete, beating Congress to the punch in a way that would have scored serious political points. Instead, they purposely released an obviously incomplete version that only blind partisan loyalists will take seriously.
In a way, it is everything that is wrong with this administration in a nutshell. Fiscal responsibility was, once upon a time, something that the GOP genuinely cared about; today it is something that they use only as a rhetorical device. Given the opportunity to actually act in a way that would produce positive change, they opted instead to treat the issue as nothing more than a partisan debating point.
For today's Republicans, campaigning is everything; governing is nothing.
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