Senate Defeats Effort to Remove Earmarks

In his latest crusade against the process lawmakers use to finance home-state projects known as earmarks, Senator John S. McCain took to the Senate floor this week with an arsenal of numbers, sharply criticizing the $410 billion omnibus spending bill as 2,967 pages of text, teeming with 9,000 earmarks.

But the only numbers that mattered on Tuesday were 63 to 32: the vote by which the Senate defeated Mr. McCain’s amendment to strip the earmarks from the spending measure, which is needed to finance the federal government through September.

The House majority leader, Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, said Congressional Democrats were not willing to relinquish their budget authority. Driving home his point, Mr. Hoyer called the spending items not earmarks but “Congressional initiatives.”

[Translation: PORK]

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