Will Earmarks Sink Omnibus Spending Bill?

Look, I get it that when you hear a campaign promise from a politician it’s about as solid a pledge as it would be to catch smoke with your hand.

Poof, it’s gone.

But I wonder when President Barack Obama is going to take a look at some of the words he’s spoken since winning the office. What you say two weeks before your inauguration should be more reliable than what you said when you’re looking for votes.

And here’s the quote from The Associated Press on what Obama said to reporters about the Economic Stimulus on January 6:

The package will set a “new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight. We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert projects without review.“

The headline for the article read: Obama bans earmarks from economic package

That was the stimulus, but now the Omnibus bill is in lawmaker hands, which is supposed to set up the funding that will run the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

And the thing is packed with 8,570 earmarks according to Taxpayers for Common Sense worth $7.7 billion. Now I know that $7.7 billion doesn’t sound like much when you consider these two spending packages are a combined $1.197 trillion dollars.

It’s less than two percent of the money in the Omnibus bill. And these earmarks are about 60% from Democrats and another 40% for Republicans, so both parties have their fingerprints on these measures.

But we’re being asked to sacrifice; shouldn’t Washington be thinking the same thing?

Maybe this is like going on a diet. OK, I’m going on a diet starting tomorrow. So I’ll eat a whole pizza myself tonight, then watch my meals starting tomorrow.

One day later, I eat a double cheeseburger. However, I’m really, really going to start that diet tomorrow….