Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Meet the hypocrites: Senator Jon Kyl

Well, that didn't take long.

Only three days after Republican Senators and Senators-elect made a big show of forsaking earmarks, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) inserted a $200 million earmark into a bill for an Arizona Indian tribe.

Of course Senator Kyl, who now must surely be scared of getting a Tea Party primary challenge in 2012 (much like his colleague John McCain this year), is playing the semantics game and claiming the funding he secured is not an earmark, even when it is.
Only three days after GOP senators and senators-elect renounced earmarks, Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, the No. 2 Senate Republican, got himself a whopping $200 million to settle an Arizona Indian tribe's water rights claim against the government.

Kyl slipped the measure into a larger bill sought by President Barack Obama and passed by the Senate on Friday to settle claims by black farmers and American Indians against the federal government. Kyl's office insists the measure is not an earmark, and the House didn't deem it one when it considered a version earlier this year.

But it meets the know-it-when-you-see-it test, critics say. Under Senate rules, an earmark is a spending item inserted "primarily at the request of a senator" that goes "to an entity, or (is) targeted to a specific state."[Emphasis is mine.]

What makes Senator Kyl's acts particularly hypocritical is that he's the Minority Whip, a member of his party's leadership in the Senate. Forget his deeds matching his words, Jon Kyl can't even keep to the internal policy set by members of his own caucus. Here are his words of just two days ago, when he penned an op-ed for the Prescott eNews.

One message Americans sent was that they want Congress to cut spending. One of the ways Congress can do that is ending the practice of earmarking. More than 9,000 earmarks scattered throughout last year’s spending bills consumed $16.5 billion of taxpayer funds, according to the nonpartisan group Citizens Against Government Waste.

Taxpayers expect their money to be used to support important activities of the government, not a pet project of a lawmaker. Do taxpayers send the Treasury a check in April so that the federal government can spend, for example, $1 million on a Woodstock museum in upstate New York?

Fortunately, the Senate was able to eliminate the funding for the museum in 2007. But, with thousands of projects hidden into lengthy spending bills, the Senate can’t vote to eliminate them all. Some wasteful projects will undoubtedly slip through the cracks. That’s why it’s important to stop the practice altogether.

Senator Kyl is representative of typical Republican leadership. For over 30 years, Republicans have railed against "wasteful spending" and "the size of government" and tried to assume the mantle of "the party of fiscal responsibility". Nothing could be further from the truth. This emperor has no clothes.

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