Clinton rolls a sizable pork barrel [View All]

[Bread and Circus]

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Clinton rolls a sizable pork barrel ;
The senator embraces 'earmarks' as a way to help N.Y. She's received campaign funds from project beneficiaries.


By Tom Hamburger and Dan Morain
Los Angeles Times


December 10, 2007

It's a real estate developer's sugar-plum dream: a mega-shopping mall complete with 10 Broadway-style theaters, an indoor river, a Tuscan village and a 39-story luxury hotel sheathed in green solar panels shaped like giant blades of grass. Plus as much as $1 billion in government-backed financing, thanks in part to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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Clinton is not the biggest earmarker in Congress; senior congressional leaders and members of the appropriations committees can and do write many more such provisions into the huge spending bills they draft. But Clinton does significantly more earmarking than most others with her relatively low level of seniority.

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Her record stands in contrast with others in the Senate seeking the presidency, particularly John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.). McCain, who has long opposed earmarks, does not write them. Obama has used the device, but now declines to earmark funds for private companies; he uses earmarks only to secure funds for government projects such as road building and hospital construction. Other senators seeking the presidency provide earmarks to home-state constituents and collect donations from recipients of the federal largesse. But The Times review found that Clinton does it on a different scale.

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Since Clinton arrived in the Senate, she has collected in excess of $1 million from earmark beneficiaries and their associates.

"This pattern shows that Clinton has made aggressive use of the pay-to-play earmark game, " said Keith Ashdown, research director for the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.