Earmarks aren't 'wicked, evil, criminal, wrong'

by Frank James

The debate over earmarks will probably not end until the last day of the Republic, which we hope isn't anytime soon, despite what that Russian "expert" says.

The debate sprang to life again because the $410 billion spending bill presently working its way through Congress is replete with earmarks, nearly 9,000 of them.

Sen. John McCain who never saw an earmark he liked, tried to get the earmarks stripped from the bill. He failed.

And that wasn't a surprise since even many a good-government type isn't necessarily against all earmarks, just the ones that become part of an illegal quid pro quo where a lawmaker promises an earmark for a campaign contribution.

It seems like the pro-earmarkers have the better argument. It's a version of the same argument gun advocates make. Earmarks don't kill people. People kill people.

The earmark, after all, is only a tool to allow lawmakers to fund specific projects, usually in their home districts.

Yes, they can be abused. But in the wrong hands so can hammers. And we're not outlawing them.

If lawmakers can't direct federal tax dollars to worthwhile projects in their home districts what good are they? A strong argument can be made that lawmakers who must stand for re-election every two or six years are in a much better position to know what's important to their constituents than unelected federal agency bureaucrats.

And those are exactly the people who would be deciding on how to spend the money if members of Congress weren't allowed to earmark dollars for projects.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip defended earmarks on Friday during a Senate floor speech. He made a lot of sense:

...I would like to say one other word about the pending legislation, the omnibus bill. I have listened to so many speeches on this floor about earmarks . I made a point yesterday in television interviews back in Illinois to make it clear what I was talking about in terms of projects coming back to our State that were earmarks .

I do not think I can be any more transparent about earmarks . What we do in my offices is to put on our official Web site every request I make for earmarked funds, congressionally directed spending from appropriations bills. For every single request, I indicate who is going to be the recipient, how much money was asked for, what is the nature of the request, and clearly make a statement that I have no conflict of interest involved in making the request. I think that is required by law, and it is certainly a valuable requirement.

Then we go through the process of the Appropriations Committee choosing those earmarks they can put into a bill. At the end of the day, we not only send out press releases in terms of those projects that have been approved, we make it clear, so people know, start to finish, every step of the way.

So when I was on the news yesterday, I said to some of the local newscasters: The word ``earmark'' has such a negative connotation, but the word ``earmark'' should be remembered in this context: I have millions of dollars in this bill that will go to communities in the suburbs of Chicago that have been dealing with serious flooding problems for decades. We have made significant progress. I worked with Mayor Tony Arredia in Des Plaines, IL, before he gave up the office recently, and we protected many parts of his community that used to be regularly, annually devastated by floods--earmarks in appropriations bills for flood control.

The metropolitan area and sanitary district has this deep tunnel that we put money into by earmark year after year after year, so that storm water can be collected there and will not run off to integrate with the sanitary sewer system and will not cause degradation of Lake Michigan and rivers and tributaries nearby. That is one area.

The second area I focused on in the earmarks has been transportation. There are specific earmarks in this bill for the expansion of the Chicago Transit Authority and other transit systems in our area. They are struggling to survive with the recession. We are trying to make sure passengers do not have to pay outrageous amounts of money for them to continue to be successful in their operation.

Another earmark: $4 million in this bill goes for the Chicago shoreline on Lake Michigan. When they surveyed the people of Chicago a few years ago and asked: What is the most important thing we have in our city that you are proudest of, they said: Lake Michigan, overwhelmingly. And they should. It is a beautiful expanse of water. Aside from the scenery and the beauty of it, it is part of the Great Lakes, one of the greatest sources of drinking water supplies in the world.

So what we have done is to address a 100-year-old shoreline that was crumbling and falling apart. I sat down with Mayor Daley. We entered into an agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers. With this agreement, the city put money up-front. We came in with money on the Federal side. We have reduced the overall cost of the project and accelerated by years--as you drive along that lakefront, you can see they are building a modern lakefront that will serve us for decades to come. It is an earmark. It is an earmark in the bill.

When I hear people come to the floor saying: This is an outrage that all these earmarks are in the bill, I think to myself: There is nothing outrageous about this.

We bragged about it. We have had press conferences about it. The people of our city think it is money well spent.

There is money in here as well going to hospitals to buy critical equipment. It is all listed--every single hospital, every single dollar--whether it is for research, cancer research, Alzheimer's research at universities, for example, or if it is buying critical equipment for hospitals that many times don't have the resources to do so. I try to help them out if I can. I think that is part of my job.

I listened to these overall criticisms of earmarks and I don't doubt that pouring through the thousands that may be in here, we are going to find some that are questionable. That is natural. One Congressman and one Senator may think something is important to his district, his community, his State; others may question it. That is part of the process. They should be questioned. But at the end of the day, to say that when you take 1 percent of this bill and allow Members of Congress to zero in on specific issues in their States, in their districts, that there is something inherently evil, wicked, criminal or wrong with it, it is not the case.

I wish to salute Senator Inouye, who is our chairman of the Appropriations Committee, for what he and Congressman DAVID OBEY, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, agreed to do, which is to dramatically cut back the overall cost of earmark projects. Under the Republican leadership a few years ago, about 4 to 5 percent of an appropriations bill would be earmarked. They have brought it down to just over 1 percent. The goal is 1 percent. I don't think that is unreasonable, that 1 percent of the spending bill would be congressionally directed in a transparent and open process; otherwise, what happens, we give the money to the agency downtown and they decide where to spend it. It isn't as if the money would not be spent; oh, it will be spent, but it may not be spent as effectively or for projects that are as valuable as many of us who represent these areas believe.

We could have given the money to the Army Corps of Engineers for the Lake Michigan shoreline. I can say what would have happened. It would have cost more, there would have been

Now, there is the other side of of course. William McGurn, who was a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush says one of the problems with earmarks, beyond the corrupting power they can exert on certain lawmakers, is that they make large spending bills easier to pass since a lot of lawmakers will have their pet projects in such legislation.

An excerpt of his Wall Street Journal opinion piece:

Which brings us to the real scandal here -- that 8,500-plus earmarks adding up to $8 billion will end up sticking the American taxpayer with a $410 billion spending bill that is filled with large and significant provisions that have gone largely undebated.

Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake understands the logic of earmarks. And he knows how lonely it can be to stand up against them.

"Look at the 2005 Highway Bill," he says. "This was a $286 billion bill that we knew we couldn't afford, with a record-setting 6,300 earmarks. But when the time came to vote, there were only eight of us who voted against it -- probably the same eight who had nothing in it."

Back then, Republicans were running the show. But in some ways, being in the minority has its own privileges. Taxpayers for Common Sense reports that though Democrats account for about 60% of the earmarks in the omnibus, six of its top 10 Senate earmarkers are Republican -- led by Mississippi's Thad Cochran. With $471 million for his state at stake, how likely is it that Sen. Cochran will hold the line against the earmark-laden omnibus the way he did against the earmark-free stimulus?

Then there are those like my own congressman, Rodney Frelinghuysen. Mr. Frelinghuysen, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, voted against the omnibus even though he managed to help fill it with $65 million for New Jersey. It's not as illogical as it first appears. If the Democrats use their majority to get the bill passed, New Jersey still gets the earmarks. Either way, he can present himself as a champion of fiscal rectitude.

For a president, the tradeoffs are tougher. When I was in the West Wing, we regularly attacked earmarks. But it was difficult to get specific without sending a member into a fit of pique. As any legislative liaison will tell you, though few senators and congressmen have enough power to get something done for you, almost all have the power to knife you in the back. And they will, as soon as they get the chance.

But Bob Schrum, the Democratic political strategist known for running losing presidential campaigns, has the better side of the argument.

An excerpt from a piece he has in The Week:

In the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s, who other than the angry, self-righteous John McCain would pause or detour to do mortal combat with earmarks? Yet most of the press echoed the Republican line, even the New York Times, which reported the probably week-long delay in passing the bill as a Democratic "failure" and then offered up a name brand Op-Ed column that uncritically reprinted McCain's manic twitterings.

The story line is probably just too easy, the punch lines too irresistible. During the stimulus debate, we had a run of stories across the media about Obama's stumbles and set-backs--just before the largest single expenditure bill in American history passed in record time and the President's approval rating reached all time highs. But it's even easier to go down the high-minded road here, because the examples McCain cites are the very caricature of a hapless, spendthrift Congress.

Never mind that many of the most glaring items could in fact help the economy. New York's wine industry will benefit from research in grape genetics. "Quick, peel me a grape," McCain twittered, ignoring the potential boost for production and jobs. The same goes for the "earmark" for blueberry farming in Georgia, catfish research in Alabama, and the "promotion of astronomy" in Hawaii. The luddite McCain noted that "nothing says jobs for average Americans like investing in astronomy." Well, yes it does--if they're hired to build the equipment or staff the facilities. The most egregious McCain reach for the cheap and the demagogic was his cute denunciation of a million dollar appropriation for "Mormon critic control in Utah," which he ridiculed as possibly "a game played by the brits." (In twitter-land, presumably there are no capital letters.) Clearly, McCain hasn't even glanced at the issue. It has nothing to do with the British, or with "Mormon crickets" who adjure alcohol and coffee; it's about pests who endanger crops, livelihoods, and yes, guess again, agriculture that contributes to economic growth.

My plight is not that all earmarks are right, but that they're like all forms of government spending. They have to be evaluated on the merits, not libeled by labeling. And in an era when more and more power has been seized by the Executive branch, why should we assume that bureaucrats, the usual Republican targets, are uniformly wiser about how to allocate federal dollars than elected members of Congress. There is no underlying philosophy of government here other than opportunistic posturing. Obviously earmarks should be transparent; obviously they can be wasteful and the process can be deformed; but earmarks can also be justified and even essential.

The Iraq Study Group, which led to a fundamental reexamination of conduct of the war, was created with an earmark offered by one Congressman, a Republican, who had had enough of Donald Rumsfeld's stubborn insistence that failure was really success. Newt Gingrich's earmark for additional cargo planes in the early 1990s, spending not requested by the Pentagon, provided needed capacity to resupply our forces in Afghanistan.