House GOP outsmarts Democrats on earmarks

by Frank James

This week, House Republicans won big and House Democrats lost face as the majority party allowed itself to be outflanked by the minority on a good-government issue, ironic since the Democrats made cleaning up Congress "culture of corruption" a key issue in their successful fight to gain control of the House.

Let’s briefly recap. The fight was over earmarks, the ability of lawmakers to direct taxpayer dollars to their pet projects to help constituents or political friends.

In last year’s campaign, Democrats made earmark-reform a priority, in part because the practice was used by convicted former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the poster boy for congressional corruption, in a quid pro quo where he’d do an earmark and get a bribe in return.

When Democrats assumed control of the House, they found themselves faced with more than 30,000 earmark requests. House rules called for the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey (D-Wisc.) and his staff to review each request to search out dubious ones.

But because the Republicans left unfinished business which the Democrats had to attend to, like budget legislation left unpassed and all the time it took to get the Iraq and Afghanistan emergency spending bill done, there wasn’t enough time to review the requests in order to find egregious earmarks.

So Obey and the House leadership decided they wouldn't include the earmarks with the spending legislation for the debates on the House floor since there was not enough time to vet them.

Instead, they would wait to disclose earmarks until the time when the appropriations legislation was passed by the House and the Senate and both bodies were in negotiations to harmonize the their competing versions—the conference.

This meant lawmakers wouldn’t be able to challenge questionable earmarks attached to House spending bills at an earlier stage, such as when the bills were moving through committee or being considered on the House floor.

They’d only be able to challenge earmarks once a conference report came to the floor by voting against the entire conference report.

Eventually, after being on the receiving end of a lot of Republican criticism Obey, who seems perpetually world-weary, especially when it comes to Republicans, said he would have published in the Congressional Record a list of the earmarks and the lawmakers behind them a month before the legislation they were attached to came up for a vote.

Obey, defended Democrats thusly against Republican charges:

The last year I was chairman of the Labor, Health Subcommittee (1994) -- I mean, the House Appropriations Committee, the Labor, Health Subcommittee didn't have a single earmark. Two years ago under Republican leadership, they had over 3,000. It was Bob Byrd and Dave Obey, under the leadership of the speaker and Harry Reid, who put a moratorium on earmarks last year. It was not John Boehner or Jerry Lewis. I will stack my reform credentials up against those two any day of the week and twice today.

Then I would also point out that the difference is that it took you a couple years to find out what Duke Cunningham had did -- or had done. It took you more than a year to find out about Don Young's highway in Florida. What we are proposing will guarantee that every single project that we intend to put in our bills eventually will be on record, in the public, just as soon as we can get them there. And the public will have and every member of Congress will have and you will have a month to scrub that list, and if you see any item that you think we ought to be squawking about, you let us know, and we'll be squawking.

That made sense to House Democrats. The problem is, they appeared to forget who the greater audience was. It wasn’t their fellow House Democrats or even the House Republicans.

It was all those people looking in on C-Span or reading blogs who heard the House Republicans’ complaints and thought that they indeed seemed to be on to something; that what the Democrats were doing flew in the face of the transparency they promised during last year’s campaign.

The Republicans remembered the greater audience. They saw the opening the Democrats had given them and they used it to declare that the Democrats were hypocrites.

They declared that the Democrats had created a “secret slush fund.” Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the minority leader, said:

“The Democrats broke promises on earmark reform by repealing the reforms that Republicans put in place last year. They have totally gutted the earmark reform package that we put in place last September. And what they've done is set up a system where you can't get at the earmarks, you can't eliminate them, and the kind of transparency and accountability that we had in our rules last year have been totally gutted. And we're going to continue our efforts to try to impose on this House real accountability when it comes to earmarks.”

The earmark reform Boehner referred to which was passed by Republicans when they controlled the House required the lawmaker seeking an earmark to be identified up front. But it wasn’t as far-reaching as Boehner made it sound.

At the time it was passed last September, some of his fellow conservatives were unhappy because it didn’t go far enough; it didn’t allow each earmark to be challenged with a House floor vote the way some Republicans wanted.

Still, Republicans used the Democrats’ position as a step stool to the high ground. They insisted that Obey and other Democrats back down. The Republicans used House procedures to stall the House until Democrats had no choice but to reach a compromise.

That allowed Republicans to claim victory, which they did in language meant to humiliate the Democrats. It was reminiscent of the Iraq debate in which the minority accused the majority of wanting to legislate a “surrender date.”

Rep. Adam Putnam (R-Fla.) said this at a press conference yesterday.

REP. PUTNAM: Well, good morning, everyone. We're delighted to have you here and excited about the opportunity to announce the agreement -- the capitulation on the part of the Democrats to restore the Republican disclosure, openness and transparency policies as it relates to earmarks.

And Rep. Roy Blunt added this…

Rep Blunt: … The truth is that our conference declared war on a slush fund, a secret slush fund for spending and we won. The truth is, we controlled the floor this week on an issue that was important to us, important to taxpayers, important to transparency. This is a big win for taxpayers, it's a big win for the media, frankly, it's a big win for Republicans. Not all earmarks are bad, but all earmarks deserve to be scrutinized and have to be justified, and the process that the Democrats were instituting was the absolute reverse of that -- where every single earmark was going to go in a bill at the last minute, where you only had one chance to vote yes or no on the conference report. And that's not going to happen now

Thus Democrats took one of their signature issues from last year’s campaign and managed to misstep, which let the Republicans, through some deft political jujitsu, wind up on top.