President Obama to Sign $410 Billion Spending Bill Despite Earmarks

  Candidate Obama made a campaign promise to veto any bills that contained earmarks. He first broke that campaign promise when he signed the stimulus bill, although he was able to use semantics in order to claim that there were no earmarks in the stimulus bill. Technically he was right, according to the traditional definition of earmarks, but the bottom line was that the stimulus bill was one giant wasteful spending bill that we will be paying for for years to come. He signed it anyway, and was able to claim that there were no earmarks in it.

   Now the administration is admitting that President Obama will sign the latest spending bill, the $410 billion spending bill, once it reaches his desk. This bill has over 8000 earmarks in it estimated between $3.8-$7.7 billion.

   President Obama can no longer play games of semantics with the signing of this bill. This bill is pork ladened and when the president signs it he will be breaking his campaign promise.

  Obama’s budget chief, Peter Orszag, is eager to just put this behind the administration:

We want to just move on. Let’s get this bill done, get it into law and move forward

   He just wants to get this bill passed and move forward. Is it any wonder that he is unwilling to spend (pardon the pun) any amount of time discussing this bill? Again we see the arrogance within this administration and it starts at the top. While President Obama is saying one thing he will sign this bill and do the opposite.

  It seems as though there is a shift in the Obama administration when it comes to earmarks:

“We want to make sure that earmarks are reduced and they’re also transparent. We’re going to work with the Congress on a set of reforms to achieve those”; said Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

  The administration has apparently gone from opposing all earmarks to the policy of reducing earmarks and making them transparent. I believe there is a name for a shift in policy such as this; flip-flop. Although I prefer to say that President Obama is breaking a campaign promise. He lied during the campaign and promised something that he could not deliver.

  That is where the problem with this administration lies. Not in the fact that he broke a campaign promise, all politicians do that, but the fact that he ran as the candidate of change, the candidate that would change Washington, and for him to go to Washington and acquiesce to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid shows us that he is no different than the others. His whole campaign was a fraud and people bought into it.

  Rahm Emanuel has been quoted as saying, and I paraphrase, never let a crisis go to waste, it allows you to do things that you normally couldn’t get away with, and that is what this administration is doing. They are using this crisis to push through spending bills that would normally have the public up in arms. But the crisis is so great according to this administration that there is no time to debate these bill, we just need to get them into law and move forward. Don’t worry, they know what is best for us. We can trust them. RIGHT!

  President Obama is still using that time honored tradition of blaming Bush.

“First, this is a $1.7 trillion deficit he inherited. Let’s be clear about that. We inherited this deficit and we inherited $4 trillion of new debt,” Emanuel said. “That is the facts.”

  So it isn’t Obama’s fault that he has to break his no earmark campaign promise, it is President Bush’s fault. President Obama knew what the economic outlook was when he was running for president. Sooner or later he is going to have to take ownership of this economy. He did that in my opinion with the stimulus bill. Whatever happens from this point on with the economy falls on President Obama’s shoulders.

  In one sentence above we see Obama’s budget director claiming that we need to sign the bill and move forward, yet in the next sentence we see Rahm Emanuel looking backwards and blaming the previous administration. This administration is trying to have it both ways.

   Once the stimulus bill takes effect there can be no more looking backwards. For better or worse President Obama now owns whatever happens to the economy. It is time for them to put on their big boy pants and accept whatever happens with the economy from here on out. He doesn’t have Bush to kick around any more.