Congressman David Obey (D-Northwest Wisconsin) is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and as such is partially responsible for the stalled war funding bill. Last night he said that "If anybody thinks that we can get out of here this week, they're smoking something illegal."
Obey likes to use this line. On March 7, 2007, he used the same line against a Code Pink protestor that was captured on YouTube.
Obey likes to portray himself as a populist truth-teller, but I wonder if his constituents in Northwest Wisconsin will ever get tired of his shtick and tell him to stop posturing and get to work.
His proposal to pass a bill without any earmarks is a complete non-starter. His colleagues will fight for their earmarks. Incidentally, I do not believe that earmarks are necessarily bad; they lubricate the wheels of Congress. They should be fully disclosed, however.
A better solution is the one proposed by Sen McConnell (R-Ky) which calls for $70 billion in war funding with no strings attached; a 1% cut in all domestic appropriations bills; and allow lawmakers to keep their earmarks.
Oh, there are special Congressional elections today in northwest Ohio and the first Congressional District in Virginia (which is a swath of eastern Virginia running from Fredericksburg to Williamsburg), but you'd never know it by reading the Washington Post's politics page. They are spending so much time focusing on an election a year from now that they can't spare a paragraph on one that occurs, you know, TODAY.
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