ST. PAUL, Minn. – Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota voted against what she calls “the failed Pelosi trillion-dollar stimulus,” but that didn’t stop her from writing letters to federal agencies on behalf of seven grant applications seeking stimulus dollars for her district.
And many more conservatives did the same thing. Criticize stimulus / earmarks in public, and go around to the backdoor to request money for their districts:
Stimulus, Earmark Critics Try Back Door For Funds
The Center for Public Integrity has discovered that lawmakers, instead of going through the congressional earmark process, have written directly to federal departments with backdoor requests for stimulus funds. It’s a practice known as lettermarking…
[...] The Obama administration tried to insulate the bill from lettermarks by ordering agencies not to consider the requests, Solomon says. But the calls and letters poured in, he says, from everyone from Democrats who had crowed there would be no earmarks to Republicans who had panned the stimulus bill for failing to create jobs.
“But when they wrote the letter to try to get money for their local district or local company, they said, ‘This project is going to create jobs, and we hope you give it stimulus money,’ and so their letters undercut the arguments they make politically on the campaign trail or on FOX and MSNBC,” he says.
