Earmarks Cause GOP Rift
Some in Party Call the Spending Pork, Others See It as Check on the White House
SEPTEMBER 24, 2010.
By NEIL KING JR.
House Republicans called earmarks symbols of fiscal decay when they swore them off completely in March. Candidates from both parties are now pledging, if elected, to never get near one.
But as Republicans prepare for a possible takeover of the House next year, earmarks have emerged as a point of contention within the party. The House Republican agenda, released Thursday, made no mention of these special spending provisions—a silence critics seized on as a sign that House Republicans plan to begin using them again.
David Keating, executive director of the anti-tax, small-government lobbying group Club for Growth, called the omission a wasted opportunity.
The debate is particularly hot among Republicans who have sought to rein in earmarks to prove their bona fides as cost-cutters. But many GOP lawmakers want to resume the practice, which lets lawmakers "earmark" legislation that can amount to billions of dollars for local projects, outside the normal competitive federal funding system. Some conservatives insist that earmarks are a constitutional prerogative that lessens the power of the White House.
But top House GOP leaders see the issue as a key test of whether the party can ditch the reputation for big spending it earned when it controlled the House last in the mid-2000s. "We need to prove that we're not going to try to pork our way back to a permanent majority, as we were trying to do before," said Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a potential Budget Committee chairman and fierce earmark foe.
House Republicans agreed to a one-year moratorium on all earmarks in March, on the same day that House Democrats, who have been more circumscribed in their approach, agreed to ban earmarks that would benefit for-profit companies. A Senate bill to impose a similar one-year moratorium failed by a large margin, when 15 Republicans voted against it.
Among those in the pro-earmark camp is California Rep. Jerry Lewis, who would likely take over as chairman of the Appropriations Committee if the Republicans regain a House majority. In 2009, Mr. Lewis secured 50 earmarks for his district, worth $82 million, according to the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.
In all, Congress last year approved 9,499 earmarks for local projects worth nearly $16 billion, about 1.2% of the $1.36 trillion the government spent on all discretionary programs.
Mr. Lewis defends the earmark practice as a direct form of democracy, and is among a sizable number of GOP lawmakers who want the party's self-imposed ban to end.
"I think that members have the right to represent their constituents, and know better than the bureaucracy does on what the real priorities are for taxpayers' money," Mr. Lewis said in an interview.
Some House Republican leaders have seized on the earmark issue as emblematic of what they see as their own party's profligate past. In their new book "Young Guns," Mr. Ryan and two of his conservative GOP colleagues, California's Kevin McCarthy and Virginia's Eric Cantor, rip into one of the most infamous Republican earmarks, the 2005 "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska. The $223 million project, which was eventually killed, would have linked the state's mainland to a sparsely populated island. The book's first chapter is titled "A Party on the Bridge to Nowhere."
All three lawmakers were involved in drafting the House's new GOP governing platform, released Thursday at an event in Virginia. Asked why earmarks weren't mentioned in the document, Mr. Ryan said Thursday on "Good Morning America" that Republicans intended to maintain the current earmark ban. "That is why it is not in this pledge," he said.
Other GOP House members said several parts of the party's overall agenda, including earmarks and Social Security, remain under debate. "We are going to reach a verdict on many parts of our agenda, but that verdict will come down after we have heard all the testimony, which means after the election," said Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee.
The House Republican moratorium sprang immediate leaks. A number of Republican lawmakers broke ranks within weeks, including Alaska's Don Young, Texas's Ron Paul and South Carolina's Henry Brown. In August, 129 Republicans joined most Democrats in supporting a bill that awarded tariff breaks—officially defined as earmarks—to a wide array of U.S. companies
The debate over earmarks has spilled into congressional races across the U.S. as tea-party and other limited-government groups focus on the practice as illustrative of Washington's excesses.
In Utah, incumbent Republican Sen. Bob Bennett defended earmarks as an important check on the power of the executive branch. He was defeated in the Republican primary by Mike Lee, who has vowed to never request an earmark.
In Pennsylvania, earmarks have become a testy campaign issue in the hard-fought Senate race between Rep. Joe Sestak, a Democrat, and former Republican Rep. Pat Toomey. Once a big earmarker himself when he was in Congress, Mr. Toomey is now promising to swear off the practice altogether.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, himself a tough fiscal conservative, is of a different mind. He called the House Republican moratorium "fraudulent" and said he was "elated" on Thursday to see that earmarks weren't mentioned in the House election platform. "That's because the ban is going to go away," he said.
Mr. Inhofe points out that as earmarks have decreased during the past several years, federal spending has soared. Reducing earmarks, he said, doesn't reduce spending.
Besides, Mr. Inhofe said, "Deciding how money should be spent is what we are supposed to be doing in Congress."
—Janet Hook contributed to this article.
Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com
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