PMA Earmarks Survive

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The Senate on Wednesday rejected a proposal to strip from the omnibus spending bill a series of earmarks associated with a lobbying firm now under federal investigation, despite warnings from reformers that lawmakers would be forced to answer for their vote in the coming election cycle.

By a vote of 43-52, the Senate defeated the amendment sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). The amendment would have eliminated 13 provisions connected to the PMA Group lobbying firm, which was raided by the FBI in November as part of an investigation of potentially improper campaign contributions.

The vote on the PMA amendment was closer than expected, with a number of Democrats waiting until the waning moments to cast their votes. The two Colorado Democrats split their votes on the amendment, with Sen. Michael Bennet — who faces re-election in two years — voting for it, and Sen. Mark Udall, who has a full six-year term, voting against it.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) voted for Coburn’s PMA amendment. At the end of the vote, McCaskill voted with Democratic leadership and against Coburn, though she had spoken out against earmarks earlier in the day.

Prior to the vote, Coburn warned his colleagues that, “Anyone who votes against my amendment on PMA — they’re going to have a lot of ’splaining to do.”

Individuals listed as PMA employees have made more than $2.7 million worth of political donations in the past decade, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has backed Coburn’s efforts on earmarks, agreed, arguing that a vote against the amendment was not just a vote to support the projects, but would set a new, lower bar for when Congress should avoid funding projects tainted by scandal. It is “not only business as usual in Washington, but we’ve hit a new low,” McCain said.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) rejected those arguments and sought to cast the debate as a vote over whether lawmakers questioned the intentions of their colleagues.

“We can’t start picking and eliminating earmarks because we think we know who the lobbyists may be,” Reid said, noting that no lobbyists’ names appear in the legislation, while lawmakers sponsoring the earmarks do. “Lobbyists don’t face the voters. Lobbyists are not accountable for the merits of these projects. ... Congressmen and Senators are accountable for these projects,” Reid said, adding that, “Every one of these ... has a Member of Congress’ name by it. That’s the person responsible.”

Anti-earmark activists have dominated the debate over the omnibus spending bill, but they ultimately lost the votes as Senators in both parties rose to defend the practice of directing spending to individual projects in their states.

Railing against the more than 8,000 earmarks in the 2009 omnibus appropriations bill, members of both parties took to the Senate floor to decry wasteful spending and “pay-for-play” politics.

The Senate on Tuesday defeated McCain’s proposal to replace the omnibus spending bill with a continuing resolution that would do away with all of the earmarks in the bill. The Senate also on Wednesday defeated a second Coburn amendment to strip out 11 earmarks that the Oklahoma Senator singled out as being wasteful. That amendment was defeated by a wider margin, 34-61.

Coburn’s PMA amendment targeted earmarks of Democrats and Republicans alike, including five projects that were co-sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

Specter told Roll Call, “These are earmarks which have been very closely examined by my office. ... They are very solid projects.”

One of the earmarks Specter supported is a $1.2 million project for PPG Inc. in Pittsburgh to develop energy-efficient window coatings; the others were less than $100,000 each for colleges and hospitals around the state.

“Nobody from PMA talked to me about any of these projects,” Specter said. These are “relatively small sums of money where I know more about these universities than the bureaucrats in the Department of Education or the Department of Health and Human Services.”