House Majority Leader-elect Eric Cantor (R-Va.) made clear Thursday the new GOP majority wouldn’t tolerate any earmarks next year — a rebuke to rank-and-file Republicans who have complained about the ban on pork-barrel projects.
“There will be no earmarks in the 112th Congress. Period,” Cantor wrote on Twitter.
Cantor’s commitment to the moratorium is a welcome sign that Republicans will honor their pledge to give up earmarks. The new GOP majority is expected to expand its conference-wide ban to the entire House once it takes control in January.
POLITICO reported Thursday that some members, including conservative Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Steve King (R-Iowa) and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), have expressed concerns about the implications of the earmark ban, particularly as it relates to transportation projects.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who had the backing of conservatives and Tea Party activists to lead the Appropriations Committee, declared: “Let’s look at transportation. How do you handle that without earmarks, since that’s a heavily earmarked bill? How do you handle a Corps of Engineers project? I think, right now, we go through a period where we have gone one step further than we meant to go, and there are some unintended consequences.”
As it turns out, Kingston and his colleagues are ill-informed about the history of earmarks. As my Heritage Foundation colleague Ron Utt explains to Mark Tapscott, “Contrary to current congressional mythology, earmarks are a relatively recent phenomena, and prior to FY 2001 they were an incidental activity.”
Utt noted that when it comes to transportation, in particular, earmarks were never the problem they’ve become today. Not a single earmark was included in transportation appropriations bills between 1996 and 1998. Today there are about 7,000 earmarks included in highway reauthorization bills.
A report released a few years ago by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) studying congressional earmarks for the Department of Transportation from 1996 to 2005 revealed an increase of 1,150% over that 10-year span.
Those numbers are clear-cut evidence that Congress has a spending problem. An earmark moratorium is one of the first steps to get control of runaway spending.
Kudos to Cantor for standing firm on the GOP’s pledge. It won’t be easy holding members to their promise, but that’s what defines a strong leader from a weak one.
