Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) isn’t satisfied with purely partisan support of an earmark moratorium.
With GOP senators affirming their support for a two-year timeout from earmarks, Coburn says he intends to compel the entire U.S. Senate to vote publicly on the issue as well.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced his support for the earmark ban yesterday, bringing even moderates like Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) along with him.
With momentum on his side, Coburn wants to put everyone on the record.
“We’re going to push it even harder,” Coburn said Monday on a conference call. “If they bring up a food safety bill, we’re going to have a vote by every member of the Senate on whether or not we ought to have earmarks.”
The Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a motion to proceed to food safety legislation.
“I’m not supporting the food safety bill,” Coburn said, “but they’re going to have the votes to make it move, so we’re going to offer a suspension of the rules and we’re going to vote on earmarks.”
Coburn, who has long opposed pork barrel politics, said no legitimate objections to a moratorium exist.
“The greatest criticism I have for those who want to earmark is that they’re basically lazy,” he said. “If they say the only way they can make sure funds go in the right direction is by earmarking them, then they really do not want to do the hard work of oversighting a $4 trillion budget — and that’s why we’re in the trouble we’re in today.”
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who with Coburn has led the push against earmarks, agrees.
“It’s a real myth that if we don’t waste it, the administration will,” he said on the same conference call. “If we didn’t earmark, we’d make sure our appropriations bills were set up in such a way that the administration couldn’t earmark either.”
Another common point — that entitlements, not earmarks, are the real source of the federal spending problem — shouldn’t preclude senators from supporting a ban, DeMint said.
“When we try to pass earmark reforms, some of our senior guys will say, ‘That’s not the problem; entitlements are the problem,’” he said. “But you can ask any of them and some of them have been here 20 or 30 years and they haven’t introduced any reform for Social Security or Medicare. … I’ve written legislation on both of those things and it’s very difficult to get anyone who’s been here a while to sign up even though they say that’s the main problem. Earmarks are a way for us as Republicans to show that we’ve gotten the message.”
Tina Korbe is a reporter in the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
