Las Vegas Sun

By wplog · November 13, 2007 · 2:29 PM

WASHINGTON — It’s one thing for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to put his name on a $500,000 earmark for the Agassi school. It’s another for Reid to secure $1 million in pork for a South Dakota State University policy center named after former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Reid has never been shy about securing earmarks for Nevada. He says pork has been around since the early days of the nation and he believes he is a better arbiter of the state’s needs than the bureaucrats in agency offices who set the budgets. But pork for the center of a former senator — who is a friend, confidante and occasional dinner guest of Reid? Leslie Paige at Citizens Against Government Waste says the Daschle earmark was just the kind of air-dropped pork that new ethics rules are supposed to prevent. The funding got tucked into the massive Labor/Health/Education spending bill at the last minute, right before the final vote. Columnist Robert Novak first tied Reid (as well as Appropriations Chairman Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia) to the Daschle earmark in Monday’s Washington Post. Actually it turns out four senators — Reid, Byrd, South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson and Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin — put their names on the earmark. However, what didn’t make headlines was that the same bill also contained a $5 million earmark for former Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker’s center at the University of Tennessee. The Baker center earmark was tucked into the bill with help from the ranking Republican on the Senate appropriations committee. Reid’s office stood by their earmark saying the funding is for “a worthy program at South Dakota University,” according to Reid spokesman Jon Summers. “The fact that so-called fiscal watchdogs are ignoring a similar appropriation… highlights their partisan motives.”