McCaskill joins effort against earmarks
Photo courtesy of the office of U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill pledged her support today for a piece of legislation that aims to cut back on government pork barrel spending.
The measure, called the Fiscal Discipline, Earmark Reform and Accountability Act of 2009, would allow senators to raise a point of order if an earmark attached to an appropriations bill has not been proposed in a separate piece of legislation. A 60 percent majority of the Senate could override the point of order and keep the earmark in the bill.
Senators from both sides of the aisle — McCaskill and Sens. John McCain; R-Ariz., Tom Coburn; R-Okla., Russ Feingold; D-Wisc., and Lindsay Graham; R-S.C. — are co-sponsoring the bill.
"We look forward to really reforming the area of how we spend taxpayer money," McCaskill said in an audio statement released by her office.
In a joint news release, McCain cited rough economic times for American families as a reason to seek "fiscal discipline."
“We have an obligation to the American people to rein in wasteful spending," McCain said. "The process is broken and it needs to be fixed. It is abundantly clear that the time has come for us to eliminate the corrupt, wasteful practice of earmarking.”
Earmarks are often added when bills have been approved by both the House and the Senate and have reached a joint committee, thus shielding any earmarks added at this stage from debate on the floor of either house.
In the audio release, McCaskill said that, when she came to the Senate in 2006, she saw pet projects getting "airdropped" into bills, and only a few legislators and staffers would be aware of the changes.
The bill would also require all bills that appropriate funding to be published electronically on a searchable database no more than 48 hours after their passage and, in addition, would require recipients of federal monies to disclose any money spent of registered lobbyists.
“We are looking at deficits in the trillions, and I think Americans are fed up with the way Washington has been spending their money," McCaskill said in the joint statement. "Changing the earmark culture is not the whole solution to bringing fiscal responsibility back, but it’s a start.”