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The House Rules Committee, prompted by a request from Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.), effectively struck three earmarks that the lawmaker himself had asked for from the Agriculture appropriations bill Wednesday night. Democrats on the committee acted in “accordance of his wishes and others’ wishes,” said John Santore, a spokesman for the Rules Committee. In a self-executing rule that cannot be changed on the House floor, the panel added a “limitation to effectively eliminate three West Virginia earmarks from the committee report accompanying the bill,” according to the committee’s website. Mollohan reportedly is under FBI investigation for his ties to nonprofit groups, the earmarks he has directed to them and real estate partnerships with at least one of the nonprofits’ officers. In the past two weeks, Republicans and outside watchdog groups have criticized Mollohan for continuing to seek earmarks for some of the nonprofits in question, including the Canaan Valley Institute, located in Thomas, W.Va. Mollohan anticipated that Republicans would move to strike the earmarks on the floor, as they did to other earmarks to the Canaan Valley Institute and other West Virginia nonprofits last week, so he offered an amendment to the agriculture-spending bill that would have prevented any money in the bill from being directed to the institute, according to one Democratic aide with knowledge of the matter. Instead of forcing Mollohan to offer and debate the amendment on the floor, the Rules Committee simply struck the earmarks from the bill. Republicans immediately questioned the move. Jo Maney, spokeswoman for Republicans on the Rules panel, said it was a “completely unprecedented” use of the committee to avoid an embarrassing public capitulation. |
