If Predictit and other leading forecasters are right, the days of a Republican-controlled House are numbered. And if the Democrats win back the majority on Nov. 6, the defeated incumbents will go into the post-election Congress with little to lose. Welcome to the lame-duck session.
For years, lawmakers have pushed more dubious spending onto taxpayers and costly regulations onto consumers during lame-ducks, with little repercussion or reason to do things differently.
Evidence shows that lawmakers become more erratic and more likely to miss votes in lame-duck sessions, prompting party leadership to dole out individual favors in order to cement participation. Even in the absence of formal earmarking, leadership uses holes in the earmark ban to push through perks and projects in order to rush through massive pieces of legislation. Unless taxpayers and consumers hold lawmakers’ feet to the fire during the likely lame-duck, America will accumulate more debt and unneeded rules.
The scene is a familiar one: lawmakers piling on earmarks, mere weeks after promising to lay off the practice. Following midterm elections in 2010, the lame-duck Congress cobbled together a massive spending bill with more than 6,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion. Responding to inclusions such as $349,000 for swine waste management in North Carolina, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., proclaimed, “The American people said just 42 days ago, ‘Enough!’ … Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia?”
Even after the Republicans took over Congress that fall, the practice of doling out goodies to “grease the wheels” for legislative monstrosities merely went underground. In the next lame-duck session of Congress in 2012, party leaders filled the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 with narrow carve-outs in order to win over otherwise sheepish lawmakers. Provisions such as the “extension of tax-exempt financing for New York Liberty Zone” and the “Modification and extension of American Samoa economic development credit” ballooned the bill from 30 pages of essential language to 157 pages of causes that came along for the ride.
Granted, there isn’t much research on the incidence of earmarking in lame-duck sessions versus non-lame-duck sessions, and there’s plenty of evidence of “perking and porking” during the latter. Following the passage of the Pentagon appropriations bill (H.R. 6157) in Congress at the end of September, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance found an astonishing 679 earmarks totaling $19.3 billion.
But evidence does suggest that party leaders get more desperate in the lame-duck to cajole lawmakers who otherwise have little on the line. Analyzing more than 29,000 House and 22,000 Senate roll call votes from 1939 through 2014, Christopher Koopman, Matthew Mitchell, and Emily Hamilton of the Mercatus Center found that House members miss more than 3 percent more votes during “very lame duck” sessions (following a party-switching election), even controlling for the time of year. Further, majority party members are nearly 5 percent less likely to vote with their party on important pieces of legislation. As a result, Congressional top-brass has every incentive to goad lawmakers to take one for the team. Defeated lawmakers may feel that, even if they lost an election, delivering some last-minute goods to constituents can pave the way for future political success.
And with large year-end spending bills being the norm, congressional lawmakers are willing to take some flack for shadow earmarking rather than have unfinished fiscal business during holiday time. Even if a provision doesn’t explicitly benefit one district, provisions that happen to disproportionately benefit a district will find their way into legislation as a way to get apathetic lawmakers interested. This year will likely be no different, with 7 of 12 spending bills unfinished and bound to open up fresh debates on Dreamers and the border wall.
At least taxpayers don’t have to sit idly by and watch lawmakers win stocking stuffers that will further increase the national debt. Citizens, along with good government groups, must continue to point out instances of reckless runaway spending, particularly in lame-duck sessions of Congress. If the GOP-led House is indeed living on borrowed time, the clock is ticking for fundamental spending reforms that would rein in waste instead of making it easier to earmark.
Ross Marchand is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.
