February 5, 2018 at 5:05 p.m.
The Apostles of Pork
The Apostles of Pork
You know the drill. Politicians like taxes and know they are unpopular so they call them fees. Ronald Reagan was even more creative, calling his tax hike "revenue enhancement," while economist Larry Kudlow called tax increases "receipts strengthening."
Just as people don't like taxes, they don't like pork-barrel spending that rips them off for needless projects and that causes the aforementioned taxes to be hiked. Of course, that's exactly what went on with the budget scam known as earmarks, which is about to make a comeback in Washington.
Before they were ended because of abuse, earmarks came about when lawmakers sat behind closed doors and divided up money among themselves for projects back in their home districts - projects that may have been useful but were often wasteful or misdirected - without any transparency or scrutiny.
Because lawmakers eager to bring earmarks back know they are unpopular, they have come up with a new name to make them politically palatable: congressionally directed spending.
That's a classic Washington switcheroo, so best to start hiding your wallets.
The idea of bringing earmarks back gained steam recently when President Trump all but endorsed them as a way to boost bipartisanship. That's absurd, and Trump is wrong.
Here's how earmarks were supposed to work: They would bring lawmakers from different parties together to negotiate which projects need to go where for the public good, and the process would engender a distribution pattern that would make everybody happy.
The public interest would be served and there would be bipartisanship in the serving.
Only it's a fiction. As we report today, it was always the kingpins of Congress who got the most money for their districts, whether their districts needed the money or the project or not.
What's more, bipartisanship for the sake of bipartisanship is not necessarily a good thing, if it ends up fleecing the American public. In fact, there's a word for when ostensible opponents team up to cheat others: collusion.
And that's the kind of bipartisanship the earmark process was. A Republican would tell a Democrat (or vice versa) that he or she would vote for their personal and wasteful project if the Democrat would in return vote for the Republican's pork. And so they worked together to screw taxpayers.
Only in Washington is that called bipartisanship rather than conspiracy. The system was riddled with corruption.
The Apostles of Pork have another argument for earmarks that is equally absurd. That is, Congress is constitutionally authorized to direct spending and if they don't decide how and where to spend this money, the executive branch will - and has - and bureaucrats are no better equipped than lawmakers to make such decisions, plus they lack the legitimacy of being elected officials.
All of that is laughable on its face. First, just because Congress should retain the power to direct spending doesn't mean the process has to be behind closed doors or that the spending decisions should circumvent the merit-selection process and bidding requirements, including the holding of public hearings on each proposed project.
But secrecy and non-merit-based decision making is the heart and soul of the earmark scheme; the so-called bipartisanship breaks down if lawmakers can't get into the back room to scratch each other's backs.
Then, too, Congress has resisted calls by conservative reformers to legitimately take back power from both the executive and the judicial branches. The truth is, Congress has methodically surrendered its constitutional powers for years, often times because they wanted to avoid political hot potatoes.
The Republican-controlled Congress could have passed the REINS Act that would require Congress to take an up-or-down vote on major regulations before they can take effect but it hasn't, after calling for it for years. The Congress could take action to restrict the appellate jurisdiction of courts, a power the constitution gives it, but lawmakers haven't done so, even as they complain loudly about judicial activism.
And Congress could take back the appropriations process by actually producing and passing publicly vetted budgets that specifically direct administrative spending. But they haven't.
To ignore legitimate avenues to take back constitutionally vested powers and then pretend that the answer is to give lawmakers the ability to conspire in secret to spend money on Bridges to Nowhere is beyond preposterous.
Should Congress direct spending, not bureaucracies? Yes, but that spending needs to be subjected to bidding requirements and merit-selection when appropriate and the spending always needs to be included in the text of legislation and subject to public hearings.
As Michael Quinn Sullivan, president of Empower Texans, said: "Simply shifting pork-barrel spending between branches of government, or giving it new branding, won't withstand the scrutiny of an American public that has grown weary of such antics."
Both parties have been guilty of abusing the corrupt earmark system. Alaska's Bridges to Nowhere, which flushed away $322 million to connect a tiny town to its airport, was a Republican fiasco, but then, as a senator from New York, as Sullivan pointed out, Hillary Clinton managed get $2.3 billion in projects for New York inserted into the budget report.
"Not the bill, the report," he observed. "That's $2.3 billion in spending without a single hearing, witness statement, or vote."
No one likes the political polarization we see in the country today, or the refusal by both sides to work on almost any issue with the other party. But that polarization exists way beyond the walls and halls of Congress, and is caused by something much deeper than the inability of congressional cronies to work together to steal the public treasury.
As such, the solutions to extreme polarization lie elsewhere.
The last year has seen significant and positive regulatory and government reform coming from the Trump administration, but the president has gone off the rails on this one, and he should resist the siren calls of Paul Ryan and others telling him that, if they just have earmarks, the world will return to normal.
In our view, if your goal is to drain the swamp, it's probably not a good idea to listen to the monsters who live in it and who depend upon its muck for survival.
So don't go there, Mr. President, because the water is definitely not fine.
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