Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid evidently forgot Abe Lincoln’s maxim that it’s better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt. Reid spoke up earlier this week and removed any remaining doubt about his misguided leadership – and his tenuous grasp of history. He ridiculously claimed that “the Founding Fathers would be cringing to hear people talk about eliminating earmarks.” This assertion came in response to the bipartisan effort led by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to force a recorded Senate vote on their amendment mandating a one-year moratorium on earmarks in the federal budget. DeMint-McCaskill has attracted the support of multiple co-sponsors, including all three of the remaining presidential candidates. Sens. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama even returned from the campaign trail in order to be in the Senate on Thursday to vote for DeMint-McCaskill.
One need not be a professional historian to know that Reid’s position is the opposite of the truth. Take, for example, Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, the father of the Constitution. When Madison was president, he considered a proposal for the national government to fund improvements to local roads used by the postal service. Jefferson’s advice speaks directly to the congressional earmarks battle today:
Recommended Stories
“Have you considered all the consequences of your proposition respecting post roads? I view it as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress & their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a scene of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest.” Jefferson’s prediction has been richly born out by the fact the current earmark deluge had its beginnings during the Reagan administration as congressmen from both parties scrambled to insert thousands of self-serving earmarks in transportation legislation. The congressional hogfest has only grown worse in the years since.
As for Madison, he wisely vetoed the public works bill, saying he found no constitutional warrant for such expenditures. Even Alexander Hamilton, Madison’s main partner in writing the Federalist Papers and the first great proponent of an activist central government, believed federal spending on internal improvements should be only on projects with a national scope, thus excluding those for strictly regional or local interests. Those seeking more detail here can go to the Citizens Against Government Waste Web site for the comprehensive report by Tom Finnigan titled “All About Pork: The Abuse of Earmarks and the Needed Reforms.”
