Last year, I made some waves over Rep. Jack Kingston not joining the rest of the Georgia GOP delegation in voting to strip pork spending from appropriations bills.

Yesterday, while pursuing the AJC I saw this…Kingston defending the tradition of pork spending:

Rep. Jack Kingston is making no apologies for being the House champion for Georgia when it comes to snagging federal dollars for his home state and his home district around Savannah.

In the current spending bills working their way through Congress for the new fiscal year, which begins next month, Kingston is sponsoring or co-sponsoring earmarks estimated at $83 million, more than any other Georgian in the House.

Despite being a conservative Republican, Kingston argues that snagging programs and projects is a time-honored tradition for Georgia lawmakers.

Some of the stuff the AJC lists are things that you can make an argument for, but there are earmarks in the past that Kingston has sponsored that are more than questionable.

An editorial in today’s Athens Banner-Herald scolds Kingston:

So where’s Kingston today, 14 years after signing the Contract With America? Touting his ability to get things done for his district the same way they’d been done by the Democratic congressional delegations in Georgia’s past, that’s where.

That may be good for Georgia, but there’s a real question about whether it’s good for the rest of this country.
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Until those kinds of needs are met, it’s more than a little unseemly for Kingston - or any other congressman who might be similarly inclined - to grandstand about their performance in manipulating a flawed system for allocating taxpayer dollars.

I find Kingston’s grandstanding comment to be a shot at a couple of his fellow Congressman from Georgia, namely Westmoreland and Deal, who routinely vote for the Flake Amendments, which are aimed at pork projects in appropriations bills. Kingston has a poor record with these amendments when compared to his colleagues, and that simply has to change.

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