Several House members held a press conference call last week to accuse Newt Gingrich of starting the earmarks bandwagon, pushing it to new heights when he was speaker. One congressman’s remarks caught my eye.
John Campbell, a California Republican first elected in 2005, said that when he took office fellow GOP lawmakers said the high demand for earmarks goes back to Gingrich and his practice of awarding funding for pet projects to House members who represented tightly-contested districts back home.
But Campbell added this:
“I frankly didn’t know that much about earmarking but my first — out of my first 70 meetings I had set up after I was a Congressman, 63 of them were people requesting earmarks. So I started looking into what is this. My gosh. I didn’t know I was elected to be an ATM. I thought I was supposed to work on policy.”