| Into The "Lions" Den |
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| Written by LL |
| Friday, 29 January 2010 20:18 |
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President Obama met today with the House GOP Caucus in Baltimore this afternoon. During a Q&A session, Utah's Jason Chaffetz stood up to ask a question.
JASON CHAFFETZ (R-UTAH): Thank you, Mr. President. It's truly an honor. OBAMA: It's great to be here. CHAFFETZ: And I appreciate you being here. I -- I'm one of 22 House freshmen. We didn't create this mess, but we are here to help clean it up. And (inaudible) talk a lot about this deficit of trust. There's some things that have happened that I would appreciate your perspective on, because I can look you in the eye and tell you, we have not been obstructionist. The Democrats have the House and Senate and the presidency. And when you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn't. I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed. You said you weren't going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did. I applauded you when you said it, and disappointed when you didn't.
You said you'd go line by line through the health care debate -- or through the health care bill. And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said, "We would like to take you up on that offer. We'd like to come." We never heard a letter. We never got a call. We were never involved in any of those discussions. And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks, and, in fact, you didn't want to have any earmarks in any of your bills, I jumped up out of my seat and applauded you. But it didn't happen. The President's answers were stunning to say the least. In answering the question about the transparency of the health care debate, President Obama said... Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process -- just over the course of the year -- overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which guys were participating... Um, Mr. President? I think that Brian Lamb (CEO of C-SPAN) just might disagree with you there sir..... On earmarks in the stimulus, the President repeated the White House mantra... With respect to earmarks, we didn't have earmarks in the Recovery Act. You know, we didn't get a lot of credit for it, but there were no earmarks in that.
...a mantra that was proven FALSE back in February on PolitiFact. Still, there are plenty of specifics in the House and Senate versions that indicate members of Congress are earmarking, at least in the broad sense of the word. PolitiFact has spent the past couple of weeks fact-checking many claims about what's in the bills. Although we found Eric Cantor was Pants on Fire wrong when he said the House bill included $300,000 for a Miami sculpture garden, the Republicans were right the House bill had $335 million for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases , and that the Senate version authorizes $198 million for Filipino veterans.
But it was the issue of lobbyists where the President made his most outrageous comments. In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren't participating in the administration than any administration that's come before us.
Oh really Mr. President? Let's look at the lobbyists that are currently serving in YOUR ADMINISTRATION TODAY! There is Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn who previously worked as a lobbyist for Defense Contractor Ratheon. There is Attorney General Eric Holder who was a lobbyist for Global Crossing up until 2004. There is Tom Vilsack, Ag Secretary nominee who was a lobbyist for the NEA. There is Mark Patterson, chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who was registered to lobby as recently as last year for Goldman Sachs and there is much, much more... Then Wednesday morning, President Obama took the "really tough" position of holding private briefings on the issues covered in the SOTU address for K Street lobbyists! A day after bashing lobbyists, President Barack Obama’s administration has invited K Street insiders to join private briefings on a range of topics addressed in Wednesday’s State of the Union.
The Treasury Department on Thursday morning invited selected individuals to “a series of conference calls with senior Obama administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address.” Now THAT is tough. |