During his recent State of the Union address President Obama vowed to veto any legislation containing earmarks, but not everyone is happy about it. His pledge could be seen as his attempt to reach out to the Republican party and gain more power and control over the now shifting House and Senate majorities.
According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid the pledge was the wrong move for the president. He has been quoted that he feels this is an effort on the part of the White House to gain more power and influence, saying that they have enough power as it is. Other Republicans have been trying to ban earmarks as a way to cut down on government spending and pork-barrel legislation.
Most Democrats and even a few Republicans argue that earmarks may not actually be a bad thing and that this is actually just a symbolic gesture, or meaningless, empty words that would change nothing in reality. Who knows if this is really just a ploy to play to the opposing party's base or something he had planned to push all along? This is one debate that no one has the answer too, though everyone in politics seems to believe that they do.
While both sides try to outdo the other with arguments and assertions that their way is right, the bigger picture seems to be getting lost. What really is best for the people and will the President's new vow actually help America? Earmarks or not, something needs to be done to reduce the United States' debts and put this country back on track economically. Surplus spending and adding extra funds and projects onto all the bills passing through government just does not seem like the best way to get this done. Maybe instead of fighting over who's right and wrong the time has come to actually look into what the best thing to do would be and attempt to make it happen.
There's been a lot of debate about earmarks and pork and so on. The last president asked for Congress to grant the President a line item veto, so that specific unnecessary budgetary items could be axed out of otherwise very necessary bills. (So many of these projects get tacked onto other bills as riders, since there's no way that each project could be voted on individually.)
ReplyDeleteI wonder if it would give the president too much power, though. He/she then could cut anything from any bill, so if Congress were controlled by the other party, just about any bill could be eviscerated. I don't know, really. But maybe it would function as a deterrent to prevent so many park projects from making their way into the bills in the first place.
The deterrent angle certainly seems to be Obama's approach with this current statement. I wonder how rhetorically powerful the deterrent argument will be in this case, though...