House Republicans did something extraordinary, brave, risky and unexpected in 2011. They banned earmarks. No longer would members’ pet projects gum up negotiation over bigger, more important bills of national importance.
This was a big risk for the GOP. What if voters, unhappy at losing a subsidy for their local beer museum, came to the Capitol with pitchforks to throw out the new Republican House?
It turned out that voters didn’t miss earmarks at all. The infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” was an unnecessary evil. Which makes it all the more puzzling and troubling that some Republican lawmakers are now agitating for a return to the bad old days. A few are openly talking about a rules change to restore earmarks and meet a public need that demonstrably doesn’t exist.
They aren’t just out of touch in doing so; they are playing with fire.
Congressmen today defend earmarks, as they have for years, based on Congress’s constitutional power of the purse. Why, they ask, shouldn’t bureaucrats decide exactly how money is spent within programs they have legislated, when members are the ones closest to their constituents and best know their own districts’ needs?
This argument is fine if you view the federal government as a sort of national ATM, so that everyone who needs a new overpass or a subsidy for their local museum should come to Washington, hat in hand. It is also fine if the highest aspiration voters should have when electing Congress every two years is to maximize the financial return to their own community.
But consider, for example: Should military procurement and planning for the next generation of weapons be left to the generals responsible for making war, with the aim in mind to arm troops as well as possible? Or should it be left instead to the issue of whether a factory producing this or that weapon is in the district of the most powerful congressman, as often happens today?
This view that congressmen are elected to divvy up a multi-trillion dollar budget would be completely alien to the Founders who gave Congress the power of the purse. They created a national legislature with that power so it could make important decisions about questions of national policy, such as whether the nation should make war, not whether Christmas tree harvesters in a North Carolina forest should receive a subsidy just because it is represented by the chairman of an appropriations subcommittee.
This argument is compelling enough, but it is still only the beginning of the case against earmarks. The remainder is about how earmarks were used in practice.
They had effectively become a system of threats and bribes that party leaders could use to force bad legislation through Congress. Within the appropriations process itself, the result was often a terrible “Christmas tree” bill to which each member had an ornament attached. When terrible or ill-considered non-appropriations legislation came across the table, congressional leaders would threaten to cut earmarks to persuade legislators to vote as required rather than according to their judgment of the national interest.
Finally, in this age of populist furor and discontent with Washington, Republicans would create a new third rail for themselves if they tried to bring back earmarks. If they want to show they are out of touch with the public anger that propelled outsider candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to the heights they reached this year, this is certainly the way to do it.
