In a New York Times article from yesterday (Jun 02) I came across some intersting information. The article itself was about lobbyist Letitia Hoadley White who started her career as an employee of Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis.
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http://www.nytimes.com/...
I know, I know, all part of the everyday stink. The part that bothered me was the matter of fact way they discuss the details of earmarks. Did you know this ...?
After Republicans took control of the House in 1994, Mr. Lewis became chairman of the housing and veterans affairs appropriations subcommittee, leaving five years later to become chairman of the defense subcommittee. Such subcommittee chairmen are known as cardinals because of their power over large parts of the federal budget. Among other things, only the cardinals and their top aides see each member's requests for earmarks, and only the cardinals have the authority to approve their insertion into the House spending bills.
Huh?! Only the author and the chairman even know what is going into a bill? I knew they were crooked but ... WOW!
Just having earmarks like this should be a crime (never mind buying and selling them, which these people are also doing).
And to show you how lucrative it is for just this one person:
When her boss, Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, assigned her to work with the appropriations committee in 1986, Ms. White found her calling: cramming spending bills with narrow provisions to finance lawmakers' pet projects. When she left the Hill three years ago, she quickly became K Street's queen of earmarks, as those provisions are known, landing tens of millions of federal dollars lobbying for her clients.
And Ms. White has done extremely well. Tracking an individual lobbyist's success at winning earmarks is almost impossible because many clients employ squads of lobbyists, and many earmarks are written so opaquely that the beneficiary is hard to determine.
But an analysis by Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks such expenditures, identified earmarks in the current fiscal year benefiting more than two-thirds of Ms. White's 53 clients. The earmarks have financed projects like machine cognition research in Florida and ammunition manufacturing in Kansas. Their value is more than $230 million.
Go ahead, read it all. It's depressing.