Why don't they?

Efforts to curb earmarks don't bother Shelby

He says his stuff can pass muster. Right. There's nothing at all fishy about building seventeen different engineering departments, or however many there are, all based in buildings named after yourself.

"I think the worst thing that ever happened up here was people abusing the appropriation process to build a bridge to nowhere and frivolous projects and everything," Shelby said in an interview last week in his Capitol Hill office. A proposed $223 million project in Alaska in 2005 was ridiculed because of the tiny population of the island it would connect, earning the "bridge to nowhere" moniker.

Oh, I can think of worse things that have happened in Washington.