Inside Politics: Musgrave Dishes on Elections and Earmarks
By Rebecca Boyle, (Bio) rboyle@fortcollinsnow.com
2:11 p.m. MT Mar 21, 2008
Despite the officially designated congressional “recess” these past few days, there’s often no such thing as a real vacation for a member of Congress.
U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Fort Morgan, was trying to make the most of hers during the Easter break. She planned to spend the holiday with family, including a Navy son who was home on leave, but visits with constituents were still on her list. So too was the chance to meet with local media and share her thoughts on the election, congressional spending, her continuing opposition to uranium mining in Northern Colorado and a potentially landmark U.S. Supreme Court case regarding gun control.
Musgrave and her staff took the afternoon Wednesday to serve lunch to 43 people at the Open Door Mission, a homeless shelter in Old Town.
In the past, Musgrave would often lay low on Congressional breaks. But in the past two years she has made herself far more visible at small-scale events like helping out at the food banks in Larimer and Weld counties, ringing the bell for the Salvation Army at Northern Colorado Wal-Mart locations and serving up food for the homeless at Open Door Mission.
Staff from her Colorado and Washington, D.C., offices helped serve food and wash dishes, which Musgrave said was good exposure to reality for her workers.
“Fort Collins is often thought of as a great place to live,” she said, adding that it was but that there was a large disparity of wealth. “But this is a dose of reality when you come to Open Door and I think that is very important for my staff to see.”
She also shared her thoughts on congressional spending, including her own decision to stop asking for earmarks in federal spending bills.
Earmarks are spending items for specific projects that are inserted into omnibus spending bills. In the past, Musgrave has secured several hundred thousand dollars for the Larimer and Weld county drug task forces, as well as programs that benefit families, transportation projects, the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State University, among others.
She said March 12 that she would refuse to request any more earmarks until Congress comes up with a way to fix the system, which has been rife with abuses like spending items for a new government policy center named for a New York congressman and the infamous “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. Musgrave had even sought a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, but did not get the assignment.
Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, also said earlier this month that he would not request earmarks, so one could wonder what might happen to Colorado projects that will lose two voices holding the federal purse strings.
Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., for one, said at a forum at CSU last month that he was proud of his earmarks, which included funding for CSU programs and research.
But Musgrave said it was better for the country to give them up.
“I’m proud of every dollar that I worked for, for earmarks. But there is a real problem in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “Because Washington has a spending addiction, there have been a few of us in Congress who have said we won’t ask for any more earmarks.”
When Musgrave did secure district-specific funding, she usually sent a press release crowing about it, so it’s not as though her previous earmarks were negotiated in quiet back rooms. Others are, however, and Musgrave said the system is thereby broken.
“This abuse of the earmark system really causes us not to operate in our oversight role,” she said, adding that it makes it easier for members to be fiscally irresponsible, or at least fiscally selfish. “... If I have a bunch of earmarks, and I have my goodies in there, and you as another member of Congress add something else in there, I’m not going to oppose those because you’re not going to oppose mine.”
She said she hoped Democratic leaders in Congress would push for meaningful reforms.
She added that she was looking forward to Colorado’s national prominence this summer during the Democratic National Convention, despite disagreeing with the candidates on most issues.
“I think the fact that we have an African-American on the ticket and a woman on the ticket on the Democrat side, I think that’s incredibly exciting,” she said, adding that her own party’s presumptive nominee, John McCain, would be equally interesting given his Vietnam War experience.
And back in Washington, she said she was monitoring the Supreme Court’s hearing of Washington D.C. v Heller, a potentially landmark case about the Second Amendment. She said she believed the amendment that grants Americans the right to keep and bear arms was about individual rights.
“I really believe our Second Amendment rights are the canary in the coal mine for all the other amendments,” she said.
It seems there’s always something to worry about in Congress, even when you’re on vacation.
