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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-
barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of
self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats
remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.
It's not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows
a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests.
Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous
strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third
as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House,
Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether -- while Democrats
roll on.
The watchdog groups -- Taxpayers for Common Sense, WashingtonWatch.com, and
Taxpayers Against Earmarks -- counted total earmark requests in the 2011
budget. Those requests were made by lawmakers earlier this year, but
Democratic leaders, afraid that their party's spending priorities might cost
them at the polls, decided not to pass a budget before the Nov. 2 elections.
This week, they distilled those earmark requests -- threw some out, combined
others -- into the omnibus bill that was under consideration in the Senate
until Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled it Thursday night. While that bill
was loaded with spending, looking back at the original earmark requests
tells us a lot about the spending inclinations of both parties.
In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested
18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion,
while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1
billion.
Where did those GOP earmark requests come from? Just four Republican
lawmakers: South Carolina Rep. Henry Brown, who did not run for re-election
this year; Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao, who lost his bid for re-election;
maverick Texas Rep. Ron Paul; and spending king Rep. Don Young of Alaska.
The other Republican members of the House -- 174 of them -- requested a
total of zero earmarks.
Talk to Republicans, and they'll say it would be nice if there were no
earmark requests at all, but party leaders can't control everybody. "Brown's
retiring, Cao's defeated, Paul is Paul and Young is Young," one GOP aide
shrugs. Still, the bottom line is that the House GOP's nearly perfect
renunciation of earmarks is striking. "For a voluntary moratorium, it was
impressive that there were only four scofflaws," says Steve Ellis of
Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The Senate is a different story. But even though some Republicans are still
seeking earmarks, Democrats are by far the bigger spenders. The watchdog
groups found that Democrats requested 15,133 earmarks for 2011, for a total
of $54.9 billion, while Republicans requested 5,352 earmarks, for a total of
$22 billion.
If you look at the top 10 Senate earmarkers as measured by the total dollar
value of earmarks requested, there are seven Democrats and three
Republicans. (The leader of the pack is Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, who
requested $4.4 billion in earmarks.) The three Republicans are Sens. Roger
Wicker, Sam Brownback and Thad Cochran. One of them, Brownback, is leaving
the Senate, while the other two are from Mississippi, which is apparently
earmark heaven.
Go down the list a bit more and the party differences are just as clear. Of
the top 50 earmarkers in the Senate, 38 are Democrats and 12 are
Republicans. And at the bottom of the list, you'll find that the lawmakers
who requested few earmarks for relatively small amounts of money are mostly
Republicans. And, of course, the senators who have sworn off earmarks
entirely (and are trying to convince the rest of the Senate to go along) are
Republicans, too.
You'd think that President Obama would be siding with those lawmakers, both
House and Senate, in the fight against earmarks. "I agree with those
Republican and Democratic members of Congress who've recently said that in
these challenging days, we can't afford what are called earmarks," the
president said in his Nov. 13 radio address. Instead, Obama pushed the
Senate to approve the earmark-laden Democratic spending bill.
No matter. The story of earmarks in the past year is one of Republican self-
improvement. The party that wallowed in earmark spending in the past decade
is trying to reform itself. In the House especially, their efforts have led
to notable success, but they're making progress in the Senate, too. Perhaps
the reforms will be temporary -- beginning next year, Republicans will
control the House and feel all the temptations of power -- but so far, it's
a remarkable accomplishment. |
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