Jim Moran has a long history with the infamous earmark – something President Obama has called “a bad Washington habit that wastes billions of taxpayer dollars”. He’s used them in exchange for campaign cash, including nearly $200,000 from a company that was shut down by the FBI. He [in]famously declared in 2006 that he would “earmark the sh*t out of” the House Appropriations Committee, and after House Republicans (in agreement with President Obama) banned earmarks in 2011, Moran boasted that he knew how to get around the ban. (All this despite an aspiration to “get the money out of politics”.)
Now Moran is waxing nostalgic about about the good ol’ days when he and his friends in Congress could blow billions of taxpayer dollars in earmarks.
U.S. Rep. Jim Moran departs Congress unrepentant on the need for those much-maligned targeted budget items known as earmarks.
Moran – who once famously, if jokingly, promised to “earmark the shit out of” the federal budget if Democrats regained control in Congress – told the annual meeting of the Inter-Service Club Council of Arlington that the spending measures that used to be inserted at the behest of individual members of Congress should be brought back.
Horse-trading among members of Congress, or between the executive and legislative branches, is hardly new. Moran noted that Abraham Lincoln had to trade things in order to win congressional support for emancipation of slaves.
“It may be messy, it may not pass muster with the good-government groups,” Moran said of the earmarks process, but “it’s a system that has worked for 200 years.”
You would think Moran would be spending this time trying to shape his shameful legacy into something positive for people to remember about his time in Congress. But he doesn’t see it as shameful, so he keeps pushing forward with the same old garbage.