Senators close 'favor factory,' for now

[nodular]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/novak/142451,CST-EDT-novak20.article

November 20, 2006
BY ROBERT NOVAK Sun-Times Columnist

"While House Republicans reacted to stinging rejection from America's voters by refusing to change leadership, their Senate counterparts tried to use their closing weeks in power to enact a last burst of pork barrel spending. But that effort was stalled by independent-minded GOP senators, spearheaded by two abrasive freshmen and one longtime hairshirt. Before Congress recessed Friday for Thanksgiving, the GOP leadership appeared to capitulate.

The freshmen, Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint, campaigning in 2004 in Oklahoma and South Carolina, promised not to fall in line with GOP leaders. Fulfilling that pledge allied them with the long-termer John McCain. They have been backed by Jeff Sessions of Alabama and another freshman, John Sununu of New Hampshire. In the lame-duck session's first week, they played Horatio at the bridge by combining to block a pork-filled omnibus spending bill...


...The cornucopia that the senators want to sneak through in the lameduck is reflected in 40 pork-stripping amendments to the ag bill that Coburn was ready to introduce in the lame-duck session. His key amendments were aimed at $1.1 million for alternative salmon research in Alaska, $591,000 for the Montana Sheep Institute and $194,000 for Goose Control in New York.

McCain has his pork-busting list for ag appropriations headed by $1 million for the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center and $6 million for sugarcane growers in Hawaii. He also wants to get rid of the earmarks hidden in the Appropriations Committee report on the bill. They include construction costs of $3 million for the Animal Waste Management Research Center in Bowling Green, Ky., and $2 million for the Grape Genetics Research Center in Geneva, N.Y."