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House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is protesting the House’s decision to shut down a GOP website on earmark reform. The website, www.earmarkreform.house.gov, which was still functional at press time, has served as a clearinghouse of GOP statements on earmark reform as well as articles, editorials and op-eds. It was launched on Feb. 12. According to a release from the office of House Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Dan Beard, the website was not in compliance with a 1999 House Administration Committee regulation that states that a “.gov” URL cannot be “a slogan” or “imply in any manner that the House endorses or favors any specific commercial product, commodity, or service.” It must also “be recognizably derivative or representative of the name of the Member or the name of the office sponsoring the website.” “It was determined the website in question was not compliant with the aforementioned rule and Mr. Boehner was asked to transition the content to another URL,” said Jeff Venturam, CAO director of communications, in an email. “The CAO is now initiating a review of all House URL’s to ensure compliance with traditional formatting.” In his Thursday letter to Beard, Boehner notes that he received a Feb. 21 letter stating that the site must be shut down and moved to a different location with a different domain name. “Changing its address now will inevitably hamper the effectiveness of the new website, much to the convenience of the majority that runs the House,” Boehner wrote. Boehner suggested the timing of the decision of the House Information Resources (HIR) office to reverse its Aug. 18, 2007 approval of the site was suspicious, claiming that the GOP has recently gained traction on cutting down on pork. “Two recent developments in particular raise questions about the timing of HIR’s reversal. [It] comes just days after an independent report revealed that the freshman Democratic class in the House has been ‘showered in pork’ by the leaders of the current majority,” Boehner said. He said the decision also comes as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected a Republican backed proposal to impose a yearlong moratorium on earmarks until the process can be studied and fixed. Beard was selected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to his post. Mike Soraghan contributed to this report |
