Earmarks are the currency of corruption.
While Republicans claim that they are “fixing” the ethics problem with lobbying limitations, earmarks are the currency in which the quid pro quo of this latest round
of corruption are transacted. Current proposals in the House of Representatives which aim to limit lobbying are attacking only half of the problem. While some in the blogosphere and the mainstream press are saying that Hassert has been at arms
length, it is the very substance of the way legislation in the house has been managed,
particularly the odious transportation bill that has fostered the climate of corruption.

Republican House members couldn’t be collecting as salesmen if there was nothing to sell. Thus, the House leadership has been integrally involved in this culture of corruption. Assuming that The K Street Project operates only on K Street is looking at only one half of the transaction. While many have focused on the gifts, trips and fundraisers, they have mostly ignored the fact that the congressmen must have something to hand out: not just the promise of a vote on a particular bill one way or another. What congressmen have to give out is earmarks.
Ken Silverstein, explained earmarks as far back as July, in Harpers: "The Great American Pork Barrel: Washington Streamlines the Means of Corruption."
"Earmarks are added anonymously, frequently during last-minute, closed-door sessions of the appropriations committees. An especially attractive feature for those private interests seeking earmarks is that they are awarded on a noncompetitive basis and recipients need not meet any performance standards."
"In the past two decades, the pastime has become breathtaking in its profligacy. ... Last year, 15,584 separate earmarks worth a combined $32.7 billion were attached to the appropriations bills ¬ more than twice the dollar amount in 2001 ... and more than
three times the dollar amount in 1998, when roughly 2,000 earmarks totaled $10.6 billion. The process is so willfully murky that abuse has become not the exception, but the rule.”

Of course it is the House Republican hierarchy which controls and thus allows, or perhaps even encourages this budget process. And it is the house hierarchy which passed “the DeLay rule” allowing DeLay to continue as majority leader even after he was indicted.

In the last session, it was Alaska’s buffoon Don Young who was the stooge invited to be chairman of a process which passed the most bloated transportation bill in history, including the famous “Bridge to Nowhere.” (which Stevens, Young, and Alaska’s governor are still
defending.)

As Josh Marshall has said, “The aim has been to harness the resources of the state to undergird Republican control -- in this case, by making more and more federal money available as patronage funds that leadership-compliant members of Congress can use to reward donors and key constituencies.”

Unassailable Republican Control was the ultimate goal, the K Street Project was the vehicle, but it would not have functioned without handouts, the earmarks inserted into every conceivable bill which functioned as the currency of the culture of corruption.
Unsurprisingly I suppose, here is Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens, known in his home state “Uncle Sugar” defending earmarks, which after all have been the currency he has used to continue his long reign in the Senate.

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