Committee Would Get Rid of Earmark Requests Because There Wasn't Enough Space

Roll Call ($$) reports that the House ethics committee is looking into connections between earmarks and campaign contributions. The investigation will likely come across a roadblock; documentation may have been destroyed on earmark requests before 2007.

Reportedly, prior to 2007 the Appropriations Committee regularly discarded Member letters requesting earmarks for spending bills. The House adopted new rules in 2007 requiring that each earmark and the Member requesting it be identified in the bill and publicly disclose the request letters identifying the recipients. But Before these new rules, the appropriations committee most likely destroyed any documentation of earmark requests. In addition, the papers of a Member's office are considered personal property. Therefore, to get any information on most earmarks prior to 2007, the only public records are press releases or news accounts. Jennifer Hing, spokeswoman for Republicans on the Appropriations Committee said that paper copies of earmark requests were kept for about two years, "and then we just don't have the space to store it anymore."

House rules require that at the end of each Congress, the committee chairmen must turn over to the Clerk of the House "any noncurrent records of such committee," which the Clerk then turns over to the National Archives. But the rules are vague on what records must be included, referring only to "any official, permanent record of the House (other than a record of an individual Member)." That definition appears to allow for an interpretation that the earmark request letters are records of the Member, not of the House.

A spokesman for the House Administration Committee said, "There is no official policy or requirement' for Members to save documents."

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