The U.S. Senate Republican Caucus voted Tuesday to limit their fiscal intake to products other than pork by voting for a two year moratorium on earmarks applicable only to the GOP Senate Caucus. This inner-party debate boiled down to a fight between a majority of members wanting to refrain from taking any earmarks versus a bloc of more realist members preferring to deal in reality.
The anti-earmark camp has long been led by Senators Jim DeMint (SC), John McCain (AZ), and Tom Coburn (OK) and now includes freshly elected Senators Pat Toomey (PA), Kelly Ayotte (NH), John Boozman (AR), Dan Coats (IN), Ron Johnson (WI), Mark Kirk (IL), Mike Lee (UT), Jerry Moran (KS), Rand Paul (KY), Marco Rubio (FL), Rob Portman (OH) according to the organization Taxpayers Against Earmarks.
Consider this column a response to the accuracy-challenged flim-flam being bandied about as of late by earmark opponents who obviously care very little about serious spending control in Washington. As of today I’m declaring myself the Founder, Chairman, and Executive Director of a new think tank. I call it BACON: Bringing America’s Cash hOme Now. BACON’s mission is simple: remind members of Congress that so long as earmarks are legal and permissible, they should go to Washington and dutifully bring home the bacon for their constituents.
So what’s wrong with Republican members passing this resolution? For starters, it is an empty, symbolic gesture that will not eliminate or even remotely reform the earmark process. All it does is suggest that GOP members refrain from putting in earmark requests or taking earmark money back to their states. It would not affect Senate Democrats or any members of the House from continuing to bring their constituent’s tax dollars back home.
In other words, Senate Republicans are saying that they’d rather pass a show horse of a resolution and distribute a glowing press release about saving money than dealing in reality. Pragmatically, it’s a colossal tactical mistake. If Republican Senators don’t submit earmark requests or take earmarks for their states, other states with more ambitious and more practical members will. That means less of Pennsylvania’s hard-earned tax dollars will be returned to the Keystone State because one of our two senators decided to sit on his hands rather than participate in the process.
Less for Pennsylvania, more for California, New Jersey, or New York where their Senators know how to deliver. Sounds like a stinker to me.
It’s the equivalent of Phillies manager Charlie Manuel deciding that he prefers the Designated Hitter rule in the American League over the National League rules requiring pitchers to hit in the regular lineup. Rather than lobbying the league to change the rules, Charlie decides to take an automatic out every time the pitcher’s spot in the batting order comes around. It makes little sense strategically and it certainly would aggravate the fans and the rest of the players on the team. The Senate Republican Caucus earmark abstention resolution isn’t much different. Certain states strike out and the taxpayers get shutout.
The real kick in the pants for Joe Taxpayer is that politicians on both sides of the aisle have used earmark spending as a political punching bag to help mask the real spending problems in Washington. Despite the efforts of long-time earmark critics like John McCain and Citizens Against Government Waste to highlight the $100,000 granted every so often to some university for conducting ant mating research, earmarking is not the cause of the country’s fiscal morass.
Pork barrel spending accounts for just about one percent of the 2010 federal budget. Meanwhile, the country is spending $1.1 trillion on two wars, almost $670 billion for the Department of Defense, $46.7 billion for the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 that does not educate one single child, and $18.6 billion this year for NASA, which is yet to produce one Klingon, Vulcan, or Romulan in its entire existence.
These figures represent the real targets of the “spending diet” the Republicans are so fond of discussing and it makes the $1 million for a science center at Susquehanna University, $1.4 million for mine safety in West Virginia, $300,000 for early childhood education in San Jose or $200,000 for a center for victims of domestic violence in Alaska look like a drop in the bucket (all are real earmark projects this fiscal year).
BACON believes that our elected officials must see things as they are and not as they wish them to be. Taxpayers in every district in every state deserve representatives who will go fight to bring their tax dollars home. Until the earmark system is reformed or eliminated, we simply can’t afford for members of Congress to reside in Fiscal Fantasyland, tilting at windmills like Don Quixote rather than working for their constituents.
Would somebody please tell Senator McConnell to pass the pork?
4 Comments so far
John C. Berg says:
Excellent point, Nathan — I’ve been thinking about this myself, but you beat me to it. I’ll just point out a couple more things:
1) Earmarks do not normally increase spending; rather, they direct an executive agency to spend some its budget in a specified way.
2) Earmarks are not clearly defined; there is no section of a bill labeled “earmarks.” Often they are not in the bill at all, but a suggestion in the committee report, or even completely off the record in informal communication, that the committee expects the funds to be spent in a particular way — with the implication that if they are not spent that way the agency will have trouble with its budget the next year. Consequently, a ban on earmarks is likely to be unenforceable.
Ken Cosgrove says:
You can get a lot done with “empty symbolic gestures” electorally. Given that the GOP ran against SF Liberal Nancy Pelosi and the President’s spending, it makes sense to do something like this that says “promises made, promises kept”. In the current age of constant communication, the distance between governing and campaigning is nil (ask the Obama Administration about how ignoring the constant campaign just worked out for them in the midterms. Continuing along the same tone deaf course will not just automatically get them reelected because of demography either unlike what some Dems are assuming. If people aren’t excited, they don’t vote. The WH has to excite those audiences not just take them for granted if it wants to win in 2012). While I agree with what you on the substantive point about this being silly in terms of budgeting and the rules of the institution, I disagree from a marketing perspective. For a lot of these candidates, this was a highly visible promise that they would have been fools not to keep because it would have cost them a point of differentiation between themselves and a Blue Dog. This shows a better understanding of the need to continue campaigning once in office than the Administration showed in its entire first two years.
Dom G says:
I think that Nathan is less concerned with “right” in terms of marketing and more concerned with right in terms of responsible/honest budgeting. Nathan’s ideas may well play out in the long run, (most likely after a steep and painful learning curve followed by a crash and burn). Politics as a constant campaign means that long term policies have to be crafted for short-terms gain.
The last part of Berg’s second comment about cutting earmarks effectively being symbolic of symbiolism only adds another layer to the marketing. Politicians can take a highly visible stance that is unlikely to realy cost their constituents anything, all while actively pretending to symbolically solve a provlem.
Dom
-should probably have finished that teaching license and gotten a cut of that ~$46b.
Dick Miller says:
Nathan, as usual you are right. If legislation can determine whether funds should be appropriated at all, when it should be spent and certainly for what purpose; it follows, then, they can also direct where the funds are spent.
I do wish they would clean up their act.
In the matter of EarMarks, they should only be able to be affixed to bills of the same subject or interest and the sponsors should be identified prior to a vote being taken.