Pork Barrel Priorities

[drscott]

From Tapscott's Copy Desk:

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, engaged in a dialogue on the Senate floor earlier this week regarding the former's amendment to transfer $60 million previously appropriated for construction upgrades that include a Japanese garden at an Atlanta federal building to the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Their exchange provides a vivid demonstration of the warped priorities encouraged by pork barrel culture in Congress.[...]

Coburn, who is a physician, offered the amendment to move $60 million from the CDC construction program to the AIDS effort. Doing so would mean "we will have enough funding to make sure everybody with HIV in this country has the medicine they need to stay alive," Coburn told the Senate, according to the Congressional Record for Oct. 26, 2005.

Coburn also told the Senate that the transfer was needed because "while people are dying from HIV, they cannot get medicines under the ADAP program because we cannot fund it significantly. We have multiple states with people on waiting lists. We have multiple states that cap the available benefits. It is a death sentence to those people with HIV today."

Coburn then noted that "the CDC has just completed a $62 million visitors center. I am asking for $60 million for people who have HIV, who are never going to get to the visitors center. I do not how we spent $62 million on a visitors center for the CDC but I believe that priority is wrong when people are dying from HIV and do not have the available medicines."

Sen. Specter then responded to Coburn by first claiming there was not Japanese garden spending at the CDC facility in Atlanta, but then upon being corrected by a staffer acknowledged that "maybe there could be a less expensive exotic garden than a Japanese garden."

The Senate then defeated the Coburn amendment on a 85-14 vote, with Specter among the Nays. [...]

Japanese gardens for the CDC bureaucrats in Atlanta. Slow, painful, unnecessary death for people with HIV. That's what we get with pork.

Comments

[excessor.livejournal.com]

This is completely outrageous. It's no wonder that people have no faith in the ability of the government to police itself.

[beastbriskett.livejournal.com]

GGRRRR!

[abqdan.livejournal.com]

Do you have the amendment #? I'd like to know how my local senators voted - an 85-14 division on this is horrendous.

I just received the following in a response to a letter I'd sent Sen. Bingaman (D) - "I have worked consistently during my time in the Senate to fully fund necessary programs and to limit pork barrel spending...". Let's see where he stood on this. My other senator, Domenici (R), never replied to the same letter, in which I'd asked them both about their position on excessive spending.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Here it is: http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=1&vote=00274

The Senators are locked into logrolling each other's pet projects. The more they are embarrassed by this kind of thing, the better.