Sen. Tom Coburn gets anti-pork amendment passed

…. in the Senate. From Mark Tapscott’s blog:

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, was successful yesterday in securing Senate passage of an amendment that he believes “will lift the veil of secrecy that conceals the process of inserting special projects – or pork – into appropriations bills.”

Tapscott goes on to report:

The Coburn amendment requires that any limitation, directive, or earmarking be included in the bill’s conference report. Previous Senate procedures allowed the Senate to automatically approve earmarks or special projects included in the House version of an appropriations bill.

Excellent. The amendment has to pass the House, though, and of course be signed into law by the President. It remains to be seen whether that happens. I hope it does. All this comes not long after the President announced to the American people that Congress wasn’t going to raise taxes in order to pay for the Katrina relief and rebuild effort, but instead take a serious look at the budget in order to make some ‘hard choices’ in cutting the pork out of it.

(Hat tip: John Cole)

On a related note, Coburn will be holding a press confrence today at 1:30 PM ET along with Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Jim DeMint (R-SC), John Ensign (R-NV), John Sununu (R-NH), and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in which they will discuss a list of options in order find savings to pay for our Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts, which we know will cost billions.

PCD says:

September 22, 2005 at 3:00 pm

Sister,

I got a list of budget offsets that the Republican Study Committee presented to Tom DeLay. The list does not list specific amounts, but it totals about $800 Billion. With $200 Billion for Katrina, a $350 Billion deficit, and X Billions for Rita, doesn’t it make sesse to look closely at what the RSC came up with?

Send me an email address and I’ll forward the information.

Sister Toldjah says:

September 22, 2005 at 10:10 pm

Who would you like to send them to?

September 23, 2005 at 8:28 am

Sister, to you to see if you’d like to edit them or post them. I got them in an e-mail and do not have a URL for you to link to. Some the ideas are nutty and won’t fly, but at least here are some people thinking of taking money away from what we don’t need and wanting to put it toward what we do need.

September 23, 2005 at 12:02 pm

Cool! You can email me at:

sistertoldjah@earthlink.net

Look fwd to seeing the list!

Brian says:

September 24, 2005 at 2:38 am

I don’t really see what this is expected to accomplished. It seems like they’re trying to do something without doing something. I’d rather see some substance instead of a change in procedure.

While I think it’s a good idea to eliminate spending on unnecessary projects, I don’t think this will come close to covering the 200 billions dollars our President is asking for in rebuilding New Orleans. The best way for our government to reduce our budget would be to pay for all of its spending. We are currently spending over 200 billion dollars each year to pay for the interest on the money our government has borrowed. The amount of money we spend to pay for interest in one year could pay for the rebuilding of New Orleans.