The Hill quotes another Congressman who believes he has a right to spend our money on whatever pork projects he can fund. At a time when serious questions arising from Appropriations chair Jerry Lewis (R-CA) have cast doubt on the credibility and integrity of the House committee, another of its members, Rep. Ray La Hood (R-IL), declared that he has had enough of the taxpayers' "crap":

Appropriations members have already vowed to fight any move to strip spending from the bill. “I’m not going to take their crap,” Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said last week. The Illinois appropriator said he included several projects for his district and would fight to keep them all.

“They think they’ve gotten a little steam building, and we’re going to have to shoot them down,” LaHood said. He ripped RSC members this year on the House floor for successfully stripping $507 million in construction projects from a military spending bill.

The Republican Study Committee had circulated a memo among the GOP caucus questioning the budget designation of unspent funds from previous years into this fiscal cycle. Simply put, those funds do not get counted for the purpose of totalling the cost of a bill. Congress does not recognize unspent funds as savings, which allows them to spend the cash on pet causes with little or no accountability. The RSC wants to rethink that process and correctly show those monies as savings, which would then require their use in other budgets to be calculated as part of the total cost. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), responsible for budget issues at the RSC, believes the existing system a "budget gimmick" that exists to bypass the spirit of budget rules.

Obviously, Rep. La Hood disagrees, and rather vehemently at that. His salty language and scatalogical reference to those who would demand more accountability for taxpayer money shows his priorities when it comes to budgeting process. La Hood, like Jim Moran, wants to have his pork and spend it too, and like Moran wants it to ensure his popularity among his beneficiaries, er, constituents back home. La Hood should explain why he thinks that money he and his committee spends should not be counted as expense, and why he thinks that unspent federal monies should get redirected rather than applied as savings from the previous fiscal year.

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» Oh, So It’s Like That, Is It? from The Sundries Shack
Seems another Congressman thinks we out here in VoterLand are getting a bit uppity. Appropriations members have already vowed to fight any move to strip spending from the bill. “I’m not going to take their crap,” Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill... [Read More]

Tracked on June 13, 2006 11:13 PM