Mention Oklahoma and most folks likely think of humorist Will Rogers, two famous college football teams (my OSU Cowboys and that other bunch down in Norman) or perhaps a classic Broadway musical.
Despite its fairly low national profile, though, the Sooner State’s two United States senators are locked in an epic battle that will go far toward deciding the nation’s economic future.
The issue is earmarks — when a senator or representative unilaterally directs federal tax dollars to recipients of his or her choice — and the contestants are Sen. Jim Inhofe, who favors them, and Sen. Tom Coburn, who doesn’t.
Both are conservative Republicans I’ve long known and admired. I first encountered Inhofe as a Republican state senator from Tulsa back in the 1960s when GOPers were scarce in an Oklahoma then dominated by Yellow Dog Southern Democrats.
In the U.S. Senate, Inhofe well-served America as ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. Inhofe tirelessly challenged the endless myths spun by global warming advocates and deserves a lion’s share of the credit for turning back cap and trade.
I first met Coburn when he spoke in 2003 at the Heritage Foundation on his book (written with John Hart) – “Breach of Trust” – about his three terms in the House of Representatives under Speaker Newt Gingrich. Now that the House is back in GOP hands, Coburn’s book is essential reading.
With South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, Coburn is the Senate’s leading earmark foe. He exposed the Bridge to Nowhere in 2005 and skewers earmarks as the gateway drug for federal spending addiction because they encourage members to vote for spending measures they would otherwise oppose in order to “bring home the bacon.”
Inhofe defends earmarks as an unqualified congressional prerogative and opposes the earmark moratorium to be considered at next week’s Senate GOP caucus meeting because “instead of reducing the federal budget, it will empower Obama administration bureaucrats to spend the funds members of Congress would have sent home through earmarks.”
That Coburn is right and Inhofe is wrong is seen in the fact Inhofe was for the earmark moratorium before he was against it. Inhofe voted for the moratorium in 2008 while seeking re-election. Now he’s against it because it allegedly violates the Constitution’s clear grant of power to Congress to direct federal spending as it chooses.
Inhofe is right, Article I of the Constitution does give Congress the final say on spending. But Inhofe uses it to invent a straw man because the crucial issue is whether Congress should exercise its authority via earmarks, not whether it can. The Founders gave Congress the power, but they didn’t expect congressmen to abuse it on their own behalf.
Inhofe’s 2008 vote reflected political reality: Most Americans recognize earmarks as invitations to corruption and destructive obstacles to reining in out-of-control federal spending.
The Founders well understood this reality, as Coburn noted in a 2008 National Review article. In a 1796 letter to James Madison, his closest political ally, Thomas Jefferson argued against federal funding of local pork barrel because “it will be the source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get the most who are the meanest.”
Madison, the father of the Constitution and, with Alexander Hamilton, its most able public defender, never meant constitutional powers to be exercised without regard for consequences, arguing that “to take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
In other words, Madison would side with Coburn. And with Inhofe circa 2008.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s CopyDesk blog on washingtonexaminer.com
