Scores of Republicans and conservative Democrats who voted against the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act subsequently wrote letters requesting funds for projects in a massive, behind-the-scenes letter-writing and phone call campaign, documents obtained by the Center show.
Those asking for money include Tea Party favorites like freshman Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., former presidential candidates Ron Paul and John McCain and Republican congressional leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana.
This is what Bachmann requested:
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., another icon of the anti-spending conservative movement embodied by the Tea Party, has complained the stimulus bill will require “massive tax increases” to create short-term jobs and ran a campaign ad this month boasting that she fought against “the failed Pelosi trillion-dollar stimulus.”
But she wrote more than a half dozen letters to federal agencies on behalf of proposed stimulus grants, including one to the Transportation Department for the St. Croix River Crossing Project that she argued “would directly produce 1,407 new jobs per year while indirectly producing 1,563 a year - a total of 2,970 jobs each year after the project’s completion.” The project did not win the award.
Bachmann told the MinnPost news site, which worked with the Center on this project, that she still opposed the stimulus because it “piled a massive amount of debt on our children and grandchildren” but saw nothing wrong with her letters. “It is my obligation as a member of Congress to ensure stimulus dollars are spent on the most worthy projects. I did just that when I supported applications for the TIGER grant program.”
What a hypocrite!
