REP. JOHN MURTHA has just
The Johnstown, Pa., Democrat does have his enemies, but few of them live and vote in his district. If you live in the 12th District, south of Pittsburgh, your job and quality of life are probably somehow linked to the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal earmarks Jack Murtha has brought home. From his point of view, this is precisely what the voters of his district have elected him 18 times to do.
He may not be immune, however, to revelations that his nephew Robert Murtha, a Johnstown defense contractor, has been the beneficiary of no-bid Pentagon contracts. Nor might he be able to shield himself from a congressional ethics probe shining light on his relationship with the defunct PMA Group, a defense-lobbying firm that sought to corral earmarks for its clients. PMA's founder, Paul Magliocchetti, was a longtime Murtha aide. The smell here isn't one of fine perfume.
Mr. Murtha is one of several entrenched members of Congress who measure political success by the bushels of bucks they provide their constituents. Earmarking is indeed a bipartisan affair. In the Senate, for example, six of the top 10 earmarkers are Republicans, but 12 of the top 20 are Democrats, according to research by the group Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Earmarks--between 8,000 and 9,000 of them, depending on whom you ask--accounted for $7.7 billion of the $410 billion omnibus spending bill passed earlier this spring. All earmarks don't necessarily represent wasteful spending, but their eleventh-hour attachment to huge spending measures bypasses any serious legislative scrutiny, and once the money is allocated to the nooks and crannies of America, tracking it becomes nearly impossible.
President Obama, who was critical of earmarking during the election campaign, chose to look the other way for now. Getting the stimulus bill signed and the money flowing was his main priority. But the president reaffirmed in his own words the conflict that exists. In reference to the pork-laden measure, he said, "So let there be no doubt: This piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability." But then he also said, "Individual members of Congress understand their districts best, and they should have the ability to respond to the needs of their communities."
Mr. Murtha, who apparently doesn't know how to take the Fifth, puts it this way: "If I'm corrupt, it's because I take care of my district."
Postscript
If Mr. Murtha is feeling any heat about his brand of public service, part of it is coming from the man representing the 5th Congressional District of Virginia, Democrat Tom Perriello.
Mr. Perriello, who upset Republican Virgil Goode in the 2008 election, is a sponsor of the Clean Law for Earmark Accountability Reform Act, which would prohibit a congressman from awarding earmarks to campaign contributors--what Mr. Murtha evidently sees as a wholesome symbiosis.
Mr. Perriello's sponsorship of CLEAR takes some nerve since Mr. Murtha is not the kind of fellow you want to provoke. The maxim "Never wound a king" comes to mind. Esquire magazine points out that Mr. Murtha, as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense, "routinely punishes other members by taking away their earmarks." (Columnist Luanne Traud of The Roanoke Times has written well about the Perriello-Murtha tension.)
It's unlikely Mr. Perriello is quaking. He doesn't seem obsessed with chasing earmarks, doesn't sit on Mr. Murtha's defense subcommittee, and has seen tougher stuff in his life than Big Jack--for instance, the brutal work of thuggish leaders in places such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, nations where he served in prosecutorial capacities.
Now, we wouldn't call Mr. Murtha Al Capone, but we'd be comfortable saying that Mr. Perriello has a lot of Eliot Ness in him.