An Earmark to Celebrate – There Must be Others, Too
Posted on October 24, 2008
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Central Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Holden was at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center yesterday to announce and get deserved credit for a $2.8 million appropriation he included in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for development of the Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute. He’s done that six times now, and has provided $31 million for the emerging, $121 million center through congressional appropriations.
Congressman Holden was celebrating “earmarks” needed to build an important new medical center in his home territory. And why shouldn’t he? What’s the function of a congressman but to represent valid public interests back home?
So long as he does it openly, which Congressman Holden does. His name has been on the appropriations for the Hershey cancer center. They’ve been listed for anyone who wants to track them. They have originated in partnership with the National Naval Medical Center and its own cancer research. That’s why they’re in defense appropriations bills.
When John McCain inveighs in a broadside manner against earmarks, does he realize that he’s indicting projects like the Hershey cancer center, among other similarly worthy ones? Does he wonder what congressmen and senators are supposed to do if not to think and act creatively in support of the public interest back home? Are they supposed to sit around waiting for the president, or fate, to provide for everything?
The strength of America is in the health of its people and in the creativity of their leaders as long as those leaders have a pertinent sense of priorities. Rep. Holden and his Hershey and Navy research partners pretty clearly do.
“The most-feared words in the English language are ‘You have cancer,’” Rep. Holden said during his Hershey news conference. “Too often, people in central Pennsylvania have had to travel to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh or Baltimore, and we’ll have a state-of-the-art facility right here in Hershey that can provide those services.”
That’s an earmark and a congressional service ? provided openly and above-board ? that’s well worth celebrating, not condemning. And repeating, until the new center is built, dedicated and functioning for the benefit of Central Pennsylvanians. That’s precisely, it would seem, what representative government is about.
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