April 21, 2009
May 19, 2009 | 41 views | 0 
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“The problem with earmarks is that it’s too easy to slip in a bad one.” That was the line delivered by Utah’s First District Congressman Rob Bishop in a town hall meeting held at the Tooele County Health Department building on April 16th. Mr. Bishop followed that comment up with “It’s a terrible process. We need to reform the process.”
While I certainly agree with those comments, I find it difficult to reconcile those with Representative Bishop’s actions and comments he made a mere 30 minutes prior to those. This year, Representative Bishop has submitted $6.5 billion in earmark requests to the Appropriations Committee. Over 90% of these earmark dollars can be directly traced to Bishop’s campaign contributors, such as Boeing.
In that town hall meeting I asked Mr. Bishop about his earmark requests and specifically about the $740,000 he requested to help McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden purchase a new MRI machine. His response: “If the forms were filled out properly, I just forwarded them on to the committee.” I followed up by asking him if he felt any responsibility as a legislator to make decisions as to the value of those earmark requests, to which I received a nonchalant shrug in response.
Here we have an elected official, charged with the task of making decisions in the best interest of not only Utah, but for America as a whole, and he lacks the political courage to even stand up for his own beliefs. Representative Bishop claims to be a fiscal conservative, he voted against the bailouts (for which I applaud him), he voted against the stimulus package, and against the Omnibus Appropriations Bill, all on the grounds that the government just shouldn’t be spending that kind of money. Yet he feels comfortable forwarding on a request for a “non-profit” corporation (read: a corporation that pays no taxes) to receive nearly a quarter of a million dollars to purchase new equipment.
Intermountain Health Care, the owner of McKay-Dee Hospital, has legal non-profit status. This status means that they not only pay no income tax, they also pay no property tax on the multitude of very high-value properties they own in the state of Utah. Property tax that would be of great benefit to an educational system that is suffering tremendously due to lack of funding. In their 2007 Annual Report, IHC had a line item of over $390 million that was “set aside for future use.” How would you like to be able to declare $390 million set aside in your bank for “future use” and not have any tax liability on it?
Throughout the entire town meeting Representative Bishop waxed philosophic about the role of government. At what level (local, state, or federal) is government action appropriate? Should government expand to address issues or should individuals be “empowered” to solve problems? His conclusion in most every case: government’s role should be limited, with individuals being responsible for solving problems. To paraphrase, he indicated that the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution’s preamble provides a great guide: does the action benefit society as a whole? If so, it falls into the realm of legitimate government action.
Given his own paradigm it seems not only hypocritical, but a gross dereliction of duty for Representative Bishop to blindly forward requests for federal money to specific corporations. Is this really the kind of person that we want “representing” us in the US Congress?