Phantom Menace

Conservatives claim to hate earmarks. Don’t take them at their word.

By Josh Patashnik, Harvard University
Tuesday April 11, 2006

The Right is angry at President Bush. National Review editor Rich Lowry complains that Bush is “running on empty” when it comes to generating new ideas. In his just-released book Impostor, former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett accuses Bush of dragging the good name of conservatism through the mud. As the base gets restless, Republicans in Congress are frantically searching for ways to distance themselves from Bush in advance of the November elections. Rumor has it that even Harriet Miers is no longer quite so sure that Bush is the most brilliant man she has ever met.

It’s not clear exactly what conservatives have to gripe about—or, more precisely, what they have to gripe about now. Little has changed in the seventeen months since their support won Bush a second term. The war in Iraq that they fervently supported is…still going on. The budget deficit they eagerly engineered as part of their deceitful “starve-the-beast” strategy is…still there. They’ve long known President Bush was pro-immigration and only halfheartedly opposes gay marriage, and now Bush…supports immigration and has no interest in pushing the Federal Marriage Amendment. The only difference is that Bush’s standing in the polls has plummeted. Apparently, conservatives’ beef isn’t with the president; it’s with the American people.

Nevertheless, if you ask your conservative friends what Bush has done to deserve such ridicule, sooner or later you’re almost guaranteed to hear the word “earmark.” Bush is a big spender, they say, and the proof is that he’s done nothing to stanch the flow of federal money earmarked for pork-barrel projects. I’d be inclined to believe them – if only conservative politicians didn’t benefit so much from earmarks.

Now, first things first: earmarks suck. They’re the dark underbelly of representative democracy, public policy at its worst. The list of frivolous projects funded by Congress is comically pathetic. In 2005 alone, it included, among other things, $4 million for shrimp aquaculture research that was supposed to be completed in 1987; $1.7 million for the International Fertilizer Development Center in Muscle Shoals, Ala.; $469,000 for the National Wild Turkey Federation in Edgefield, S.C.; $100,000 for the Punxsutawney Weather Discovery Center Museum in Punxsutawney, Pa.; and $70,000 for the Paper Industry Hall of Fame in Appleton, Wis. Yes, that’s right, the paper industry has a hall of fame—buy your tickets now.

Progressives, who believe that government can and should be a positive force in society, have a special obligation to make sure that government doesn’t waste taxpayer dollars. There are a handful of honest conservatives in Congress—like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.)—who remain committed to fighting pork, and progressives should forcefully and unequivocally join them in their fight.

But, truth be told, there are good reasons why only a few Republicans have any interest in fighting earmarks. One is that if earmarks were eliminated, a central theme of the Republican political narrative would be rendered inoperative. Conservatives believe, almost as an article of faith, that government spending is wasteful. It’s an argument they’ve attempted to sear into the nation’s political conscience since the Reagan years.

Are they right? On balance, no. Earmarks certainly are wasteful, and whenever conservative groups like Americans for Tax Reform talk about wasteful government spending, they usually cite things like the National Wild Turkey Federation as an example. But the fact is that in 2005, earmarks accounted for only $27 billion out of a total federal budget of over $2 trillion. That’s a whopping 1.3 percent of total federal spending. To cite earmarks as definitive proof that most government spending is wasteful is misleading at best.

What does the federal government spend its money on? A full two-thirds of it is concentrated in only five areas: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense, and interest on the Reagan/Bush national debt. Though privately they might like to, Republicans have no real plan to cut any of this spending—it would be electoral suicide. Much of the remaining one-third of federal expenditures, for things like education and farm subsidies, is similarly politically sacrosanct, for better or worse.

So conservatives, at least those who have to run for office, do not really believe in smaller government. But to admit that would be to discredit everything they have been telling voters for the past quarter-century. Railing against earmarks allows them to continue to sing the same tired old song about wasteful spending, without proposing to actually cut the popular programs that make up the lion’s share of the federal budget.

There’s another big reason why Republicans need earmarks to maintain their congressional majority: it’s a form of institutionalized bribery. Progressives have one big advantage over conservatives: their philosophy of government is well-liked by the public. “The simple, tragic fact is that conservatism isn’t popular. It just ain’t. … Americans like government more than card-carrying conservatives do,” admits the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. In order to win elections, conservatives have to overcome this built-in disadvantage. They’ve become remarkably good at it in recent years, in large part by portraying progressives as spineless, Francophile opponents of traditional values.

But at the congressional level, earmarks play a key role. The GOP’s strategy for the midterm elections is to localize them, by shifting focus away from the big national issues—health care, pensions, energy, corruption—on which progressives have a big advantage. “Local dynamics will trump everything,” predicts Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), head of National Republican Congressional Committee. The RNC has advised its incumbents to run as “federal mayors,” finding money in Congress for everyday problems in their districts. Need a bridge? Earmark. A power plant? Earmark. An international fertilizer development center? Earmark.

Indeed, there’s an elegant, if cynical, logic to this. If your goal is to keep government as small as possible, and if you don’t particularly care whether that money accomplishes anything, it’s much cheaper to buy off swing voters with pork-barrel projects in a few dozen districts than it is to implement programs that might really make a difference, like universal health care or wage subsidies for the working poor. This might help explain why earmarks have skyrocketed since Republicans captured unified control of the federal government, from an average of $11.8 billion per year during Clinton ’s presidency to an average of $22.3 billion per year during Bush’s.

It’s put up or shut up time for conservatives when it comes to cutting earmarks. For all their blustering and vague proposals for “earmark reform,” I’m not expecting them to take the axe to pork-barrel spending anytime soon. But don’t take my word for it. I’ll let the ever-eloquent House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) speak for himself on this one, which he did when an enterprising reporter asked him a straightforward question on the subject in January:

QUESTION: What does earmark reform mean? Does that mean getting rid of earmarks?

SPEAKER HASTERT: That’s something that we, first of all, want to do through regular order. But an earmark means that somebody, first of all, says that, I need have this project in my district. That’s what members do. I mean, they represent their districts. They take cases to Congress and say that, We need this, or, I need help here, or, I believe that this issue should move forward. In a lot of cases, the Senate plays appropriation games. And you who are familiar with it watch that all the time. They may move a lot of money in one area and we may put earmarks in for water projects—I’m talking about energy and water, for instance, may put earmarks in for water projects or energy projects, and all of a sudden, you know, they don’t have any earmarks in, and it gets a game back and forth, and things like NOAA become projects that end up being earmarks for senators.

Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Speaker. The trough’s open, boys.

 
Josh Patashnik, a junior at Harvard, is originally from San Diego, Calif. He is the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Political Review. Josh can be reached at patashn@fas.harvard.edu.

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