Last week, the House Republican leadership chose Alabama representative Jo Bonner to fill an empty seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee. The seat opened up when Roger Wicker of Mississippi was appointed to the Senate in December to replace Trent Lott. Bonner was a favorite to win the slot: He is on good terms with the leadership and, like Wicker, represents a safe southern district. Bonner also has close ties to appropriators, having served as chief of staff to his predecessor Sonny Callahan, a long-time appropriator.
Appropriations seats are always sought-after, but this time as many as seven Republicans clamored for the prize. Contenders included vulnerable members like Washington's Dave Reichert; Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who wanted to use the position to fundraise for vulnerable members; and the pork-busting firebrand from Arizona, Jeff Flake.
Flake is a fierce critic of "earmarking," the practice by which appropriators slip district-level "pork" projects into appropriations bills without a floor debate or vote. Many members of the Republican Study Committee, the House's caucus of fiscal conservatives, and conservative bloggers supported his bid. But even though Minority Leader John Boehner wants to reform earmarking--and House Republicans recently tried (and failed) to pass a House-wide earmark moratorium--Flake was considered a long shot for the seat. He has reportedly angered the leadership with his criticism of the appropriations process and Republican spending--criticism that has some justification, given recent history.
In 1995, when Republicans took control of Congress, they were full of promises of fiscal responsibility. Dick Armey, who became House majority leader that year, says they practiced spending restraint "with very serious rigor"--and discretionary spending decreased from $609.2 billion in 1995 to $581 billion in 1998 in constant dollars. But House Appropriations chairman Bob Livingston soon refused to work with the fiscal-restraint proponent Armey, who was in charge of floor scheduling. At that point, in Armey's telling, "discipline broke down," and discretionary spending began to rise. It hasn't stopped since. In 2006, total discretionary spending, adjusted for inflation, reached $823.5 billion.
The House wasn't the only culprit in the demise of Republican spending restraint. Other players included the Republican Senate (which some policy analysts say is even more extravagant than the House), a Democratic president, and a Republican president with spending initiatives of their own. Add to that the new homeland-security initiatives after 9/11, two wars, Hurricane Katrina, and the allure of earmarks, and all attempts at spending restraint went out the door. In 2006, the party paid dearly at the polls.
Flake and his fellow fiscal conservatives say reining in spending begins with ending earmarks. As Senator Tom Coburn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed two years ago, "Earmarks are a gateway drug on the road to the spending addiction. One day an otherwise frugal member votes for pork, the next day he or she votes for a bloated spending bill or entitlement expansion: A 'no' vote might cut off their access to earmarks."
Tom Schatz, president of the anti-pork group Citizens Against Government Waste, cites another reason why the number of pork-barrel projects exploded in the mid-1990s: "the belief...that providing earmarks would help vulnerable Republicans get reelected."
Particularly after 9/11, Armey notes, the House leadership--Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and Appropriations chairman C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida--moved away from the 1994 principles and focused instead on keeping the majority. He says that appropriators "would go to the campaign committee and say, 'Who do we have that's in trouble, and what can we do for them?' And they'd say, 'Well, Congressman X is in trouble in Indiana, and what you can do is get him that bridge he's been working on.'" Armey concedes that "this enormous explosion really came from the leadership," although the appropriators were complicit and should have fought for more discipline.
Last year the House adopted a rule requiring members to disclose their earmarks. Nevertheless, members, especially appropriators, are earmarking as much as ever. Last week, Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) ranked Young and his successor, Jerry Lewis of California (now the committee's ranking member), as two of the top four House earmarkers in 2007, cashing in at $169 million and $137 million in Appropriations earmarks, respectively.
Although TCS calculates that earmarks have decreased 23 percent since 2005, 8 of the top 10 House earmarkers (and 9 of the top 10 Senate earmarkers) were appropriators. Flake, who does not request earmarks and would have been the only appropriator not to do so, says this is why the committee needs an anti-pork member: "That's the problem when we bring up earmarks. People turn around justifiably and say, 'Hey, look at the biggest abusers.'" And the cycle continues.
Still, House members agree that the problem with earmarks isn't necessarily the earmarks, but the time spent earmarking. Earmarks are "only 1 percent of the budget," says Flake, but they "drive up spending everywhere else because you spend all your time earmarking," leaving little time for oversight of entitlement spending, for example.
Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, an appropriator who supported Flake's bid for the seat, explains further: "If you eliminate an earmark, it does not drop spending. It just lets the money be un-earmarked, and then a bureaucrat makes the decision instead of an elected official." This makes earmarking "easier to justify," with the result that appropriators spend most of their time sizing up thousands of earmark requests instead of wrestling with more consequential appropriations issues.
Chris Edwards, director of tax policy at the Cato Institute, says that until the system is reformed, earmarking will go on unrestrained, "regardless of who is in power." Democrats are continuing the Republicans' policy of directing earmarks to vulnerable members. Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, says that by not appointing Flake to the committee, Republicans missed an opportunity to make a "strong statement" about earmark reform. Jo Bonner supported the moratorium--but his own earmarks totaled nearly $28 million this year.
Reform-minded policy analysts agree that Republicans should enact a unilateral earmark moratorium and appoint Flake-types to the Appropriations committee in 2009, when six Republican members will retire. For now, though, Republicans will continue to pork it up at least until Election Day.
Samantha Sault is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.