Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007

LEGISLATIVE TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 2007 -- (Senate - January 11, 2007)

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Mr. COBURN. The question I have is, The distinguished Senator from West Virginia asked the question: How long and at what price? But that is a false choice. Because if we leave Iraq and we walk away, we are going to be fighting this battle again. So it is not about how long and at what price; it is, when are we going to have this battle again? I believe that is up for debate. What the American people lack is the understanding that if we walk out now, we are going to put young men and women again at risk, at far greater numbers and at far greater cost in the future, as we empower the terrorists. I wonder if the Senator from Arizona may comment.

Mr. KYL. In response to the Senator from Oklahoma, that is the point I raised at the very end. It is not only a question of whether the President's new strategy has a chance to succeed, as he believes it does, but what is the alternative. If the alternative is leaving Iraq a failed state, I have barely scratched the surface of identifying the horrors that that would represent and the dangers to American national security that it would involve. We need to do a better job of articulating that alternative. As I see it, that is the only alternative that has been put forward to the President's new strategy.

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Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I don't think you can have a discussion on earmarks until you set the predicate for what is really going on. It is not dishonorable to want to help your home State. The vast majority of those things that are considered earmarks are not bad projects. They are not dark. They have a common good that most people would say would be adequate.

The question about earmarks is, What has evolved through the years and what have they become? I believe earmarks have been the gateway drug to the lack of control of the Federal budget. The proof of that is, look at who votes against appropriations bills. I will promise you, there won't be Senators in this body who have an earmark in a bill that will vote against the appropriations bill. What does that say? Does that mean everything in that bill was good; they agree with the bill?

What it means is, they have an earmark in the bill. And if they vote against it, the next time they want an earmark, they won't get it. So you have the coercion of using earmarks to control votes.

Our oath is to do what is in the best long-term interest of our country. No matter what our political philosophy, we are all Americans.

We can all agree about that. And whether we are liberal or conservative, we don't want any money wasted. But as we spend money on things that are earmarks that are not bad but definitely should not be a priority when we are fighting a war and have a gulf catastrophe and a budget deficit of $300 billion we are passing on to our children, we get the priorities all out of whack. Priorities are what the American people said they wanted us back on, and they wanted us back on it together.

The bill that is on the floor, as the Senator from South Carolina said, addresses only 5 percent of that problem--5 percent of the earmarks. The Congressional Research Service looked at that--12,318, of which 534 would fall under the bill that is on the floor--correction, 12,852 is the total and there are 12,318 that this bill would not apply to at all. It would have no application to it at all.

The other problem with earmarks is there has to be sunshine. Fixing the problem to make everybody think we fixed it versus really fixing it is what this bill does. It is a charade, as far as earmarks are concerned. There is nothing wrong with wanting an earmark or for me wanting to bring something to Oklahoma. I have chosen not to do that because I cannot see how Oklahoma can be helped with an earmark when we are borrowing $300 billion from our kids and grandkids. I cannot see how that priority can be greater when it undermines the future standard of living of our children and grandchildren. But to put this bill up without the House version--and even it doesn't go far enough because it doesn't list who the sponsor is until after it is passed. In other words, you don't know who the sponsor is until after the bills come through.

We need to be honest with the American people. The only way we are ever going to get our house in order fiscally is to have complete transparency on what we are doing, so they can see it. Today the President of the Senate and I passed a bill that will, after the fact, create transparency so that everybody will know where all the money went. But it does nothing before the fact. We need the discipline to control the spending and to not use this tool of earmarks as a coercive tool with which we get votes on appropriations bills that are spending more money than we have.

This last year, a subcommittee I chaired in the last Congress had 46 oversight hearings where we identified over $200 billion in discretionary waste, fraud, or duplication. We ought to be taking up those things. We ought to be eliminating that. We can do tremendous work.

The other thing that is important in the earmark discussion is that you don't have an earmark if it is authorized. When it is authorized, that means a committee of the Senate--a group of our peers--looked at it and said this is a priority and something that should be done; therefore, it is no longer an appropriations earmark because it has been approved by the committee of jurisdiction.

The best way to eliminate earmarks is to bring them into the sunlight, get them authorized, and allow Appropriations to fund them. That way, we have 100-percent sunshine and the American people know what we are doing, and we defend that in the public, open arena of committee hearings. We should not be afraid to do what is right, what is open, what is honest, and what is transparent for the American public. They deserve no less than that.

The earmark provision that is in the bill in the Senate that we are debating right now is cleaning the outside of the cup while the inside stays dirty. We should not let that happen. There is no doubt in my mind that Senator DeMint's amendment is going to lose.

So the question has to come to the American public, are you going to hold the Senate accountable for acting as though they are fixing something when they are not? Anybody who votes for this bill, with the language in it the way it is today, is winking and nodding to the American people and saying we fixed it. But we didn't. Everybody here knows it won't be fixed with the language as it sits today. So it is going to require the American people to have great oversight over us to see who votes for this bill. If you are voting for this bill, you don't want to change the way business is done here; you want to leave it exactly the way it is and leave everything alone. So you want to tell everybody you fixed it when you didn't. That smacks of a lack of integrity in this body that belies its history.

I yield back my time.

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Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield for a moment?

Mr. DeMINT. Yes.

Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, I will make a point. There is nobody down here defending the other side.

Mr. DURBIN. I am here.

Mr. COBURN. I would love to have a debate on the basis of why the amendment that is in this substitute should not cover the other 95 percent of the earmarks. I ask the Senator from Illinois, what is the basis for only covering 5 percent of the earmarks in the bill.

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Mr. COBURN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. DeMINT. Yes.

Mr. COBURN. I make the point, if you got better reporting on 5 percent and no reporting on 95 percent, you have nothing. That is the whole point. Before the Senator from Illinois came down, I said it is not dishonorable to ask for an earmark. Most of them are good projects. I made that point.

But to not have 95 percent of the earmarks reported, whether strong or weak, and say we are going to report 5 percent of the earmarks and report them strongly is not cleaning anything up.

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Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, first, that is not an earmark program. It is not an earmark. Everybody knows it is not an earmark. It is the 95 percent that is in the report language that nobody knows about and on which we are not going to report.

The American people deserve transparency. The Senator is good. Senator Durbin is very good, and I understand debating with him is difficult, but he is not to the point. The point is, that is not an earmark. It is a great move to the side. That is not an earmark. Items authorized are not earmarks. That is the point I made before the Senator from Illinois came to the floor.

All we have to do to get rid of the earmark program is to authorize them in an authorizing committee. Let a group of our peers say they are good. But we don't want to do that. We want to continue to hide this 95 percent that is hidden in the report language that the American public isn't going to know about until an outside group or some Senator raises it to say: Look at this atrocious thing.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. COBURN. I would like to finish. The point being, let's not send a false message to the American public. This provision that is in this bill is a sham in terms of cleaning up earmarks, and if you are going to defend it, then you are going to have to defend it to the American public.

It will not eliminate 95 percent of the earmarks, it will not make them transparent, and they will never know until after the fact who did it, why, when, and what lobbyist got paid for it.

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Mr. COBURN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?

Mr. DeMINT. I yield to the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. COBURN. I want to put in the RECORD this idea of Federal entity, non-Federal entity. Let me give my colleagues examples of Army Corps of Engineers' earmarks in report language:

Six hundred thousand dollars to study fish passage, Mud Mountain, WA;

Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to remove the sunken vessel State of Pennsylvania from a river in Delaware;

Five hundred thousand dollars for the collection of technical and environmental data to be used to evaluate potential rehabilitation of the St. Mary Storage Unit facilities, Milk River Project, MT;

Five million dollars for rural Idaho environmental infrastructure. Nowhere will you find in that bill what that is for. The American people ought to know what that is for. We ought to know what that is for.

One million and seventy-five thousand dollars for a reformulation study of Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point, NY;

One hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Teddy Roosevelt Environmental Education Center;

One million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Sacred Falls demonstration project in Hawaii;

Two million dollars for the Desert Research Institute in Nevada.

None of those are authorized. Nobody will hold anybody accountable for those earmarks. Nobody will know it happened unless we bring it up on the floor, and then we would not have the power to vote because the coercive power of appropriations in this Congress is, if you don't vote for it, you won't get the next earmark you want; you will be excluded from helping your State on a legitimate earmark.

The American people better pay attention to the vote on tabling this amendment because anybody who votes to table this amendment wants to continue the status quo in Washington as far as earmarks.

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