Democarcy In Action
The Cato-at-liberty blog talks about how senators are adjusting to the new laws preventing earmarks by putting direct pressure on the departments heads of government to use their budget on the senator’s earmarks.
Members have been speed-dialing executive branch officials and asking them to fund their specific earmark requests out of agency budgets even though they were purged from the larger budget bill. This Congressional lobbying can be hard for the average federal bureaucrat to refuse, since he doesn’t want to offend those on Capitol Hill who control his budget. …
Some might think of this as wrong, but pressuring department heads to use their allocated funding for political earmarks should be viewed as appropriate given the fact that the we did vote those politicians into office. That is simply to say we can control how those senator use coercion to repay those voter who voted for them.
February 19th, 2007 at 7:59 am
True, although if we as voters decide we don’t want to be bribed in that way, we should feel free to make a stink about it and not vote for them again.
February 19th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
i prefer the part where we crack down on all bribing, rather than allow the bribing to be out in the open, but controlable.