Santorum Won Earmarks AS DONORS GAVE
Published: January 15, 2012
The announcements flowed out of Rick Santorum’s Senate office: a $3.5 million federal grant to Piasecki Aircraft to help it test a new helicopter propeller technology; another $3.5 million to JLG Industries to bolster its bid to build all-terrain forklifts for the military; $1.4 million to Medico Industries to upgrade equipment for its munitions work.
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Rick Santorum with his family at his concession speech after losing his Senate re-election bid in 2006.
While in office, Rick Santorum secured millions of dollars in earmarks for companies like JLG Industries, which makes lift equipment.
Each of the news releases represented an earmark or, in some cases, multiple ones — the practice by which members of Congress set aside money in federal spending bills for what critics often denounce as pet projects back home.
Mr. Santorum, who picked up the endorsement of a group of prominent Christian conservative leaders on Saturday, has been trying to persuade conservatives to coalesce behind his candidacy. His rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have seized upon his spending record in an effort to cast doubt on his fiscal conservative bona fides.
But an examination of Mr. Santorum’s earmark record sheds light on another aspect of his political personality, one that is at odds with the reformer image he has tried to convey on the trail: his prowess as a Washington insider.
A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash.
Earmarks, long a hallmark of a pay-to-play culture in Washington, have become largely taboo among lawmakers of both parties. But that element of Mr. Santorum’s record has mostly gone unexplored, in part because transparency rules governing earmarks did not go into effect until after he left office.
In just one piece of legislation, the defense appropriations bill for the 2006 fiscal year, Mr. Santorum helped secure $124 million in federal financing for 54 earmarks, according to a tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. In that year’s election cycle, Mr. Santorum’s Senate campaign committee and his “leadership PAC” took in more than $200,000 in contributions from people associated with the companies that benefited or their lobbyists, an analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times shows.
A senior adviser to the Santorum campaign, John Brabender, said Friday that contributions from earmark recipients would “not have been a factor in any way” in the senator’s decision to support their projects, adding that they were a fraction of the more than 100,000 people who gave money to Mr. Santorum’s 2006 re-election campaign. Source
