By Associated Press
Washington, DC – Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama is leaving behind a long wish list of federal funds for home-state goodies with the adjournment of Congress. And he'll have a harder time playing Santa Claus next year as his party slips into the minority and he loses his gavel over the appropriations subcommittee he has chaired for two years. It was that gavel that allowed Shelby to stuff his panel's fiscal 2007 spending bill with Alabama pork - earmarks as large as 30-point-four (M) million dollars for a new F-B-I forensics training center at the Army's Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville and as small as 100-thousand dollars for a music outreach program at the University of Alabama. But after losing their majority in the November elections, G-O-P leaders decided to punt the already overdue spending bills into next year, leaving them to Democrats to finish. As a result, Shelby finds himself suddenly beholden to the party he abandoned in 1994 to become a Republican, and some of his pet projects could have to make way for the wishes of newly empowered Democrats. In a worst-case scenario, they could all be stripped from the bill for at least a year. Shelby predicts that Democrats would take a 60 percent share of earmark money and give Republicans 40 percent.