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Rep. Murtha ripped for 'invisible' $1,000,000 earmark

Vocal anti-war Congressman John Murtha is under fire for a million-dollar earmark to an entity his Democratic colleagues could not prove even existed.



The House of Representatives recently passed an energy and water appropriations bill that included a $1 million earmark for the "Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure" in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the hometown of Congressman John Martha (D-Pennsylvania). Congressman Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) tried unsuccessfully to get the earmark stripped from the bill after his staff could not find a website for the Center.

When Flake took to the House floor and asked the chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, Peter Visclosky (D-Indiana), whether the Center actually existed, Visclosky said he did not know. Despite Flake's objection, the bill -- earmark included -- passed overwhelmingly.

Leslie Paige of the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste notes Murtha did not even come to the House floor to defend his earmark.

"Congressman Murtha seems to have actually created a new form of earmarks, which is earmarks for muggles, which mean we -- we muggles, us lousy taxpayers -- can't even know what it is," says Paige. "We aren't even allowed to see the earmark. It's like invisible."

Paige says Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's earlier vow to reform the earmark process was merely bluster -- and that Murtha's dubious earmark is symptomatic of a much larger problem.

"You've got to remember that back when the Democrats took over Congress under Chairman [David] Obey, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the promise was made that this would be the most transparent Congress," she points out, "and that they were going to peel the lid back from the spending process and show us all how the sausage is made.

"Well, it doesn't appear that they've done anything more than their predecessors did," Paige continues, "which is shove the stuff willy-nilly in the bills [and] defend it at all costs -- even when it makes no sense, even when they can't even explain whether or not the entity receiving the money physically exists. So much for the most transparent Congress in history."

It turns out Murtha's $1 million earmark will go to a private sector firm called Concurrent Technologies Corporation, which has donated $7,000 to Murtha's re-election campaign since 2002.