The Young And The Shameless

A couple years ago, Don Young (R - Corruption) snuck an earmark into a highway bill calling for funding a highway interchange in Florida that would benefit a real estate mogul and friend of his. Don Young's from Alaska, did I mention that? But that's not the most shocking part of this escapade:

The 'Coconut Road' earmark wasn't in the bill passed by the House and Senate. I don't mean it wasn't in the original bills before they went to conference (where the separate bills from the House and the Senate are reconciled into a single bill). It wasn't in the final, reconciled piece of legislation passed by both houses of Congress after conference.

But it is there now.

So here's what happened. Apparently Young added the text after Congress had already passed it but before the president signed it. As Laura McGann explains in this post, this must have occurred during the process called "bill enrollment" when revisions of grammar and technical but not substantive changes are permitted to be made.

The president did sign the bill. But the portion apparently added by Young, if I understand anything about our system of government, was never passed by Congress. So it means nothing.

Not only that, the county in Florida which was the beneficiary of the earmark voted to send it back and disassociate themselves from Young's dirty dealing. And his constituents back home are turning on him, protesting him at public events while wearing pig masks. But Young's got a whole new problem.

A Justice Department corruption task force is investigating whether Alaska Congressman Don Young took campaign cash in return for securing $10 million for construction of a proposed Florida highway ramp that would give a windfall to a local real estate developer, a source familiar with the inquiry said Friday.

The controversial funding, which was to pay for a study of the potential highway interchange abutting environmentally sensitive land, was slipped into a massive 2005 Transportation Department bill, congressional aides say.

Investigators’ interest in the Florida earmark stems in part from its timing. In the two weeks before and after the earmark was inserted in the spending bill, Young’s campaign and political action committee collected contributions from the Florida developer, Daniel Aronoff, and Aronoff's lobbyist as well as a number of other Florida business executives. The Florida donations, mainly from real estate interests, totaled more than $40,000.

Young sees himself as someone whose entire goal in Congress is to bring back money to his state and for his contributors. He views government as an ATM machine. And now he's been caught making one too many withdrawals.