Congressional Transparency Should Not be Optional

Once again, our elected officials in Congress have told us that We, the People don't really need to know how they spend our hard-earned money. Yes, I'm referring to the use and abuse of earmarks and the proposed moratorium on their use by the Senate. Fortunately, all three presidential candidates supported the bill, though Senators Clinton and Oboma have used earmarks extensively and got on the bandwagon only recently. Senator McCain however has been a strong advocate of earmark reform for many years and backed this very bill.

Don't get me wrong, earmarks have their place and serve a purpose in directing funds to projects that are important to the local constituents of our elected officials, projects that would likely be overlooked by the executive branch. However, most earmarks these days are not reviewed by the Senate or the House of Representatives, but are instead inserted into bills anonymously during the conference phase after the bills have been constructed and debated. The president is then left having to decide whether to sign a bill full of obscenely expensive anonymous earmarks or veto a bill he (or she) would otherwise support vigorously. This quite simply is not rational.

One of the biggest problem with the current earmark process is that lobby-backed revisions can be inserted into bills by anonymous senators and representatives after they have been debated on the floor, thereby skipping the review process of the House and Senate. This virtually eliminates transparency in government spending legislation and certainly provides a conduit to corruption.

I applaud Senator McCain for his strong and long-standing advocacy of earmark reform and am very disappointed in the Senate's blatant disregard for the importance of legislative transparency. A complete tally of how rationally your senators voted on this issue can be found here.