White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is tied to 16 earmarks worth $8.5 million dollars in the Obama budget bill that is being debated in the US Senate this week.
The Seattle Times and Free Republic reported:
Although President Obama has repeatedly pledged to ban congressional earmarks, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has 16 such projects, worth $8.5 million, in the bill the Senate is to begin debating today.
The earmarks include money for a Chicago planetarium and a Chicago suburb. Obama has been relentless in criticizing the use of earmarks; in his address to a joint session of Congress last week, he boasted how the economic-stimulus package was “free of earmarks.”
By the end of this week, however, Obama’s likely to sign a separate $410 billion spending plan that keeps most domestic programs funded through Sept. 30, the end of this fiscal year. It’s a plan that contains about 9,000 earmarks.
President Barack Obama is tied to an earmark worth $7.7 million dollars in his budget bill.
Obama’s name was being removed from the earmark by fellow senators although the earmark will remain in the bill.
Newsmax reported:
President Obama and top members of his administration appear to be sponsoring hundreds of millions of dollars of earmarks in the 2009 budget that Obama is trying to push through Congress, CQPolitics.com reports.
In the congressional report that accompanies the budget legislation, Obama is listed as a sponsor of a $7.7 million earmark for “Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Vocational Institutions.” Obama’s co-sponsors on that earmark include Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
President Obama pledged to fight the addition of pork-barrel earmarks to legislation during the presidential campaign. Last April, for example, Obama released a statement stating: “We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’ seniority, rather than the merit of the project.”
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