Your Daily Grayson
by digby
Howie filled in the background of the House maneuver in this post and concluded:
House Rules define an earmark as legislation authorizing a grant to an entity outside of statutory, administrative, or competitive award process. Section 6 of H.R. 3 grants a right-of-way and a temporary use permit, outside of an established statutory, administrative, or competitive award process, to only one entity: the Keystone XL pipeline. The bill also is unconstitutional because it violates the separation of powers, and offends the principle underlying the prohibition of bills of attainder.
Speaker John Boehner has two days to consider and respond to Grayson’s resolution.
“The Keystone XL Pipeline deal is an earmark to a foreign corporation, plain and simple,” Grayson said. “House Republicans claim to have been incredibly keen on ridding our legislative system of Congressional earmarks-- yet here they are-- hypocritically sneaking one in for a foreign corporation. They seem to believe that the ‘no earmarks’ rule does not apply to them. That’s just unacceptable.”
I'm pretty sure the Republicans (and a fair number of Democrats) think that giveaways to oil companies are what they've been sent to congress to do. They certainly don't think of them as "earmarks" which I believe are defined as "any local project that doesn't benefit one of my rich donors."
I'm all for congressional authority and I would guess that in this case, the President might even welcome them taking that Keystone hot potato off his hands. But this is a a crude (pardon the pun) usurpation of executive power, in order to favor a specific, and extremely controversial, project is brazen, even by this congress' standards.
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