Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
We've had the earmarks conversation before Joph. I thought you said they weren't a problem? Strange...
What's strange? I'm not complaining about earmarks, I'm demonstrating the hypocrisy.
It's not hypocrisy though. Many Republicans want to eliminate earmarks. They have not succeeded in doing so, largely because Dems love them. Thus, both Republicans and Democrats continue to use them. If a football coach thinks that the "pushout rule" is unfair to receivers, but the league creates the rule anyway, do you think he should teach his defense not to do it on principle?
Of course not. You're making an absurd argument. The position is that the rules should be changed. That doesn't make it hypocrisy to continue to follow the existing rules until that happens.
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Of course it's not.
For proponents of the bill? Absolutely. I think you are laboring under some bizarre notion that my primary objective here is to attack Nelson for making this deal. It's not. My point is to show just how weak the bill in question is that it can only be passed in this manner.
Normal earmarks are irritating and ethically questionable, but by and large they don't affect the core workings of the bill they are in. You can deny it all day long, but there is a pretty significant difference between saying: "I'll support your health care bill if you include an amendment which provides funding for a local health clinic in my district" and "I'll support your health care bill, but only if you allow my state to opt out of the costs". One of those speaks volumes about the viability of the core proposal in the bill itself.
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I mean, you say it is because you need a talking point and a way to make yourself feel better but me paying for a bridge or a museum or whatever isn't materially different than me paying for Medicaid in Nebraska. In each instance, money's leaving my pocket for some other state.
So we're agreed that both are wrong! Great.
There are degrees of wrong though. This goes well beyond a simple earmark Joph. You can insist it doesn't, but a whole hell of a lot of people disagree with you. Earmarks are on the edge of constitutionality. This pushes well across that boundary. You simply can't single out a state for exemption purely on the grounds that the senator required it to vote for the bill. There isn't even a veneer of rationale for this.
Earmarks are only legal because in principle they can be said to be parts of the bill in question. Even though we all know they are essentially bribes, there's no way to say that for certain. Maybe that bridge really is a legitimate use of federal transportation funds?
But there is no legitimate reason to exclude a state from paying for a program like this Joph. None. The *only* reason it's getting that deal is because they needed the Senator's vote. Period. It's obvious. It's the difference between awarding a contact to a guy who happens to invest some of those profits into a company which a cousin of yours owns stock in, to handing money over in a briefcase. On may be a form of payback, while the other is obviously so.
What's amazing is that the Dems have become so brazen about this they aren't even pretending. I suppose they can be though, when people like you will still sit there and insist they've done nothing wrong. So what happens when the Dems just earmark funds directly from a bill into someone's campaign fund? Or right into their back accounts? Do you defend that to? Cause it's still just money being shuffled from one hand to another, right? I guess you just get so used to the idea of it being "ok" for the government to do whatever it wants with your money, that you just don't care anymore. Not only that, but you'll cheer it on...
Sad.
