By Jennifer J. Foster
Posted 03/11 at 12:46 AM
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From CNN:
A spending bill that funds the U.S. government for the rest of the budget year passed the Senate on Tuesday despite complaints about nearly $8 billion in what critics called “pork-barrel” projects.
Senators voted 62-35 to cut off debate on the $410 billion measure and passed it on a voice vote immediately afterward.
Eight. Billion. Dollars. In earmarks.
(SARCASM ALERT) Awesome!
You know, it’s getting hard to hear anything out of Congress anymore with a straight face.
I thought President Obama was going to war on wasteful spending.
Oohhhhhh. He meant next year.
Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, said Sunday that the president will sign the omnibus bill, which includes nearly 9,000 so-called pork-barrel projects. In doing so, he used a nice little analogy about a baseball game:
(Orszag) argued that the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, which it inherited from the previous administration. The bill would keep the government running through 2009.
“This is like your relief pitcher coming into the ninth inning and wanting to redo the whole game,“ Orszag said. “Next year we’re going to be the starting pitcher, and the game’s going to be completely different.“
Yeah ... no.
Mark Impomeni writes for AOL:
It is technically true that the omnibus bill is “last year’s business” in the sense that it provides fiscal year 2008 funding for federal agencies, which Congress never got around to completing. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The bill was introduced and debated last month, under Obama’s watch, and contains increased funding for Obama Administration priorities. Some would say that makes the president as responsible for the bill’s contents as the Democratic Congressional leaders who allowed the appropriations bills to lapse last year and the omnibus to be loaded up with earmarks.
Yes. Some would say that—not only because it’s true, but because Obama is the bill’s last stop. If we’re sticking with Orszag’s goofy baseball analogy, Obama can veto that bill and call a do-over. He can reschedule the whole game.
But he won’t.
So, in the meantime, taxpayers are left with another awful budget that will funnel their money to things like digitizing and editing the Buffalo Bill Historical Center’s Cody, Wy., collection; “educational programs” at the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Honolulu and parking garages all across America.
U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, told CNN: “It is in America’s best interest to close the book on the last administration and let the new one hit the ground running.“
(This just in from the I-Can’t-Believe-The-Nerve-Of-That-Guy Department: The Polynesian Voyaging Society earmark was sponsored by ... Daniel Inouye.)
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post.
By Jennifer J. Foster
Posted 03/10 at 10:14 AM
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One in 50 U.S. children is homeless every year.
Think about that: Either in your child’s class at school or in the classroom next door, chances are good that there is a child without a home.
That staggering report comes from the National Center on Family Homelessness, which estimates the total number of homeless children in America to be 1.5 million.
That absolutely boggles the mind.
It gets worse: 42 percent of those homeless children are under the age of 6.
Can you imagine having a young child—or two, or three—and not having a place to lay their heads at night?
The societal implications of homelessness, especially among children and families, is enormous. The study confirmed common-sense assumptions about the problem: Homeless children have poor health, emotional problems and low graduation rates, according to CNN.
Center president Ellen Bassuk warned that these numbers, as sobering as they are, are bound to get worse: “These numbers will grow as home foreclosures continue to rise. The consequences to our society will play out for decades,“ Bassuk said. “As we bail out the rest of our nation, it is also time to come to their aid.“
I have to disagree with Bassuk’s characterization of help for homeless children as a “bailout.“ These children have made no poor decisions that have resulted in their circumstances. It’s lunacy to lump them in with the morons who have mangled this country’s economy and put capitalism on life support.
This is no bailout. This is a moral obligation this nation has to its youngest residents.
Beyond the moral obligation, addressing this scourge makes economic sense. It’s in our best interests to create a viable, dependable, sensible safety net that provides these children with stability and security—and their parents and guardians with an opportunity to get back on their feet.
This is the sort of issue that Republicans, still searching for a message, should seize upon. This is a problem with demonstrable consequences, and addressing it harnesses the power of government for some of its best purposes—things the GOP is supposed to stand for: Protecting the vulnerable. Fostering independence. Promoting the pursuit of happiness.
But I’m not holding my breath ... at least, not until Rush tells them it’s OK.
By Jennifer J. Foster
Posted 03/10 at 01:20 AM
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CNN’s Jack Cafferty has this little piece about concern surrounding the federal economic stimulus package:
USA Today reports that studies by two conservative think tanks show illegal aliens could take 300,000 new construction jobs — or 15 percent of the two million jobs to be created by U.S. taxpayer dollars. The numbers of illegal workers getting jobs could be especially high in states like California.
These reports blame Congress for not forcing employers to certify the status of workers. The House of Representatives had included a provision in its version of the bill that would require employers to use a Homeland Security Program called e-Verify, but the Senate didn’t include it, and the provision wasn’t in the final bill that went to the president. So much for putting Americans first.
It is a possibility—a probability, actually—since the citizenship verification program known as e-Verify was left out of the conference product a few weeks back.
e-Verify was highly controversial, though I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Here is a program that is 99.6 percent accurate in terms of pegging whether an employee is a legal worker, and it’s in general use, but you actually had some politicians fighting its inclusion in the stimulus. (Sarcasm alert) It’s so cumbersome and unreliable and time-consuming, its usage among employers is on track to grow 442 percent over 2007 numbers by the end of this year!
Now I am going to share with you something that I’ve been keeping under my hat for a few weeks.
I was curious to know what happened to e-Verify in the conference, so I asked U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby about it at his town hall meeting here in Auburn a few weeks ago. After calling on me, he rephrased my question, then ignored it completely. He began taking comments from others in the crowd about immigration generally. He never got back to me.
For the record, my question, specifically, was, “What happened to e-Verify in conference? Who was responsible for killing it?“
Shelby didn’t answer me, but I found out anyway.
Here’s what we knew going in: e-Verify was in the House version of the stimulus package, but it wasn’t in the Senate version. Then it was dropped in conference.
I spoke with a couple of aides at Shelby’s town hall, and they indicated a general unease with the question. I probed them on it a bit more—who was to blame? I asked. I want names. I was told that since Shelby wasn’t a conferee, he had nothing to do with it (though they reiterated that Shelby had supported U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions’ amendments to tighten this part of the stimulus, as Shelby himself had pointed out during the meeting). Then I was told, cryptically, to look at who the conferees were.
OK, so I checked it out. In the House, conferees were U.S. Rep David Obey (D-Wis.), who chairs Appropriations; U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.), who chairs Ways & Means; U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who chairs Energy & Commerce; U.S. Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.); and U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) (yes, two conferees from California. Shocker!). As the Appropriations Committee noted in its report when the House passed its version of the stimulus, e-Verify was included:
E-Verify: Extends the E-Verify authorization for 5 years as passed by the House in July 2008 (H.R. 6633) on a vote of 407-2.
And there was actually another e-Verify-related amendment added in Appropriations: According to NumbersUSA’s Congress Watch, in addition to the extension amendment, “Rep. Jack Kingston successfully added another amendment that would require any contractors awarded work through stimulus money to verify the employment eligibility of their workers through E-Verify.“
SO! The House voted 407-2 for e-Verify ... last summer. Sounds like a pretty important priority to them, right? And it looks to have the support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too; a provision doesn’t get brought up for two votes in six months—as e-Verify did—unless the speaker’s a fan.
That brings us to the Senate conferees. They included Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), who chairs Appropriations; U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who chairs Finance; U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.); and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
Stay with me here.
I called each one of those senators. I spoke with staffers in each one.
Reid’s office didn’t respond to my inquiry.
Ditto for Inouye.
Baucus’s and Cochran’s aides both suggested I check back with the House Appropriations Committee.
Grassley’s office sent this from him:
I’m extremely disappointed that the final stimulus bill didn’t include some very important E-verify provisions. Many people, in both the House and the Senate, supported these provisions and understood their importance. The American taxpayer is spending nearly a trillion dollars to spur the economy. It’s not much to ask that the companies receiving hard earned taxpayer dollars actually make sure they are employing legal workers.
In addition, his aide added that although Grassley was named a conferee, he “was not invited to any of the conference meetings but the Democratic leadership where policy was discussed. So, neither the Senator, nor his staff, were able to work for the inclusion of the e-verify provisions in the final bill.“
Here’s why I was wondering about all this. e-Verify spawned an unholy alliance of sorts, the kind of cooperation rarely seen in Washington—two perennial counterweights working together on an issue. In this case, it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Civil Liberties Union working against e-Verify.
So I wanted to know who won out. Was it the Democrats and the ACLU? Or the GOP with the Chamber?
I was told that the person actually responsible for killing e-Verify was not a conferee, but he’s no slouch.
If I was revealing this in “Clue” terms, I would say that it was McConnell in the conference room with the white-out: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was the one responsible for ditching e-Verify and its protections for American workers in the stimulus package, according to what I was told.
I called McConnell’s office for a response.
I got none.
So, if these projections from USA Today are correct, there are about 300,000 illegal immigrants who owe Sen. McConnell a thank-you note—and 300,000 American workers who owe him a response of a somewhat different nature.
