United Liberty

The Club for Growth has been targeting big government Republicans for years, so endorsing Sen. Dick Lugar’s more fiscally conservative opponent, Richard Mourdock, was expected. But they’ve been hitting the Washington veteran especially hard recently, especially now that Mourdock is in striking distance.

Earlier this week, the Club for Growth made a signficant buy for an ad that ties Lugar to the $15 trillion national debt and slams him for backing the Wall Street bailout, gas and payroll tax hikes, and opposing spending cuts. And they’re not stopping there.

Yesterday, the Club for Growth released a detailed report showing some of the earmarks that Sen. Lugar has supported and the dollar amounts of pork that he has managed to take home to Indiana. The Club for Growth also points out that Lugar has showed little interest in reforming the earmark process and has voted against a ban on earmarking.

Dick Lugar Pork Book

So much for that earmark ban. According to CNN, the defense spending bill that cleared the House on Thursday contains a provision that will allow members to spend freely on projects back home:

The defense bill that just passed the House of Representatives includes a back-door fund that lets individual members of Congress funnel millions of dollars into projects of their choosing.

This is happening despite a congressional ban on earmarks — special, discretionary spending that has funded Congress’ pet projects back home in years past, but now has fallen out of favor among budget-conscious deficit hawks.

Under the cloak of a mysteriously-named “Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund,” Congress has been squirreling away money — like $9 million for “future undersea capabilities development,” $19 million for “Navy ship preliminary design and feasibility studies,” and more than $30 million for a “corrosion prevention program.”
[…]
Roughly $1 billion was quietly transferred from projects listed in the president’s defense budget and placed into the “transfer fund.” This fund, which wasn’t in previous year’s defense budgets (when earmarks were permitted), served as a piggy bank from which committee members were able to take money to cover the cost of programs introduced by their amendments.

And take they did.

Below is a collection of several links that we didn’t get around to writing about, but still wanted to post for readers to examine. The stories typically range from news about prominent figures in the liberty movement, national politics, the nanny state, foreign policy and free markets.

Ex-aide’s book paints harsh Palin portrait (Politico)

High Court Passes Up Ten Commandments Return (Fox News)

14 Trillion Reasons Military Spending Should not Be Sacrosanct (Bastiat Institute)

Harry Reid: “The time has come for us to outlaw prostitution” (Las Vegas Sun)

When It Comes To Dealing With Our Fiscal Problems, The Public Is Stupid (Outside the Beltway)

Can Obama “Pull a Clinton”? (The American Spectator)

The Neocons Couldn’t Wait to Bring Democracy to Iraq (Campaign For Liberty)

Below is a collection of several links that we didn’t get around to writing about, but still wanted to post for readers to examine. The stories typically range from news about prominent figures in the liberty movement, national politics, the nanny state, foreign policy and free markets.

Because of the earmark ban put in place by House Republicans and President Barack Obama’s pledge to veto bills containing them (though the White House did step back from that after the State of the Union address), Senate Appropriations Chairman Dan Inouye (D-HI) has gotten the message:

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii Tuesday said he would not accept requests for earmarks for the next two years – a move that comes after President Obama said in his State of the Union address that he would not sign any bills with earmarks.

“The President has stated unequivocally that he will veto any legislation containing earmarks, and the House will not pass any bills that contain them,” Inouye said in a statement. “Given the reality before us, it makes no sense to accept earmark requests that have no chance of being enacted into law.”
[…]
“The Appropriations Committee will thoroughly review its earmark policy to ensure that every member has a precise definition of what constitutes an earmark,” Inouye added. “To that end, we will send each member a letter with the interpretation of Rule XLIV (44) that will be used by the Committee. If any member submits a request that is an earmark as defined by that rule, we will respectfully return the request.”

Inouye expects leader to revisit the issue next year.

While the jury is still out on whether Republican leaders in the Senate got the message on the mid-terms, it looks like John Boehner and Eric Cantor are hearing Americans clearly (at least, so far). According to The Hill, they will push to ban all earmarks in the 112th Congress:

The top two House Republican leaders said on Friday that they will hold a vote to ban all earmarks for the 112th Congress.

Presumptive Speaker Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) and presumptive House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced that their GOP conference would vote next week to ban all earmarks.

“Next week the House Republican Conference, including all of our newly elected Members, will vote on a measure that would impose an immediate ban on earmarks at the start of the 112th Congress,” the leaders said in a joint statement.

Boehner and Cantor called earmarks “a symbol of a dysfunctional Congress” that “serve as a fuel line for the culture of spending that has dominated Washington for too long.”

Whether or not the caucus will go along is another story, but this is a positive sign from House Republicans.

Scroll down to see the list of members support or opposing the Senate GOP moratorium on earmarks beginning in 2011.

Senate Republicans are feeling the pressure from the tea party movement on imposing a moratorium on earmarks, which is set for a vote on Tuesday, November 16th:

Tea Party Patriots (TPP), a national umbrella organization of local Tea Party groups, is asking its members to call Republican senators and demand that they agree in a caucus vote next Tuesday to forgo all earmarks in the upcoming Congress. In an e-mail to their 134,000 online members headlined, “Our first battle with the newly empowered GOP,” the group’s national coordinators single out for phone calls the two highest-ranking Republicans in the Senate, among others.
[…]
McConnell and his veteran allies, such as Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), are reluctant to give up the perquisites of their seniority and the hundreds of millions of dollars they annually send to their home states for pet projects. The Tea Party Patriots’ call to action asks members to call their home-state senator if he or she is a Republican who has not committed to supporting DeMint’s amendment. In addition to McConnell and Inhofe, it lists five other senators to call, of whom three are in the Republican Senate leadership: Minority Whip John Kyl (Ariz.), GOP Conference Chair Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), and Conference Vice Chair John Thune (S.D.). The other two senators on the hit list are Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and John Barrasso (Wy.).

Remember the ban on earmarks to for-profit companies that Democrats announced a few months ago? Well, companies have found a way around it:

Just one day after leaders of the House of Representatives announced a ban on earmarks to profit-making companies, Victoria Kurtz, the vice president for marketing of a small Ohio defense contracting firm, hit on a creative way around it.

To keep the taxpayer money flowing, Ms. Kurtz incorporated what she called the Great Lakes Research Center, a nonprofit organization that just happened to specialize in the same kind of work performed by her own company — and at the same address.
[…]
“It reminds me of the line from “Jurassic Park” — ‘Life will find a way,’ ” said Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, who has pushed for nearly a decade to curtail earmarks. “When you have easy money like this, it finds a way, and members find a way to enable. And that is happening again.”

In ignoring the spirit of the ban, some lawmakers are leaving it up to Congressional committees to block them, a prospect that both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill concede will be near impossible.

“No matter what they tell you, there is just no way they can police all that,” Mr. Flake said. “They just don’t have the time or resources.”