During the president campaign, it often seemed that John McCain's fix for the US economy, corruption in Washington, the Washington National's poor performance on the ballfield, and everything else was to end congressional earmarks and draw attention to the congressmen and senators who propagate them.
Earmarks, as I wrote in September, are a practice by which legislators secure federal funding for projects in their home districts by attaching relatively small items to the legislation that allocates the federal budgetAlso known as pork-barrel spending, the items constitute roughly 1% of the federal budget.
McCain lost the presidency, but hasn't given up on the earmarks. Yesterday, he and Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold introduced a bill to curtail the practice. Entitled "A bill to provide greater accountability of taxpayers' dollars by curtailing congressional earmarking, and for other purposes," the legislation went largely unnoticed in official Washington yesterday, as everyone was focused on Roland Burris's more entertaining struggle to win admission to the senate.
Barack Obama has said he will not tolerate earmarks in the massive, nearly $800bn economic stimulus legislation he hopes congress will pass soon after his inauguration. But he acknowledges that some projects of the sort McCain derides as pork are worthy recipients of federal dollars.
