Earmarks are back, and Republicans are hypocrites

One argument to explain the breakdown of congress into gridlock and chaos is that loss of earmarks transferred power from committee chairmen to rank and file members of congress. With earmarks, chairmen routinely offered earmarks for local spending back home ("pork barrel spending") as bribes for re-election in return for their votes. That system appears to have mostly gone away at some point in the past and it, along with some other things, coincided with the rise of an increasingly broken congress.

The New York Times writes:

Stuffed inside the sprawling $1.5 trillion government spending bill enacted in March was the first batch of earmarks in more than a decade, after Congress resurrected the practice of allowing lawmakers to direct federal funds for specific projects to their states and districts. Republicans and Democrats alike relished the opportunity to get in on the action after years in which they were barred from doing so, packing 4,962 earmarks totaling just over $9 billion [~0.6% of the total] in the legislation that President Biden signed into law.

“It’s my last couple of years, so I decided to make the most of it,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri and a member of the Appropriations Committee, who is retiring after more than two decades in Congress. He steered $313 million back to his home state — the fourth-highest total of any lawmaker.

Often derided as pork and regarded as an unseemly and even corrupt practice on Capitol Hill, earmarks are also a tool of consensus-building in Congress, giving lawmakers across the political spectrum a personal interest in cutting deals to fund the government. Their absence, many lawmakers argued, only made that process more difficult, and their return this year appears to have helped grease the skids once again.

It is odd that some Republicans are joining in the festival of pork (porkfest) since Republican dogma claims that, e.g., all government domestic spending is bad, private sector markets and corporations (with the constitutional rights of citizens) solve all our problems, government causes all our problems, real Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps, only weenies take tax dollars, America cannot afford domestic spending, and other hypocritical and/or mendacious drivel like that. 

On sacred principle, Republican states should refuse all of that evil spending and do their own bootstrap pulling instead of being pedophilic socialists and taking government blood money. Of course that won't happen. Those Republican states will grab every last tax penny with gusto. There will not be not one shred of concern about all those highfalutin conservative anti-government principles. All that claptrap about bootstraps and whatnot is just Republican Party propaganda nonsense. They talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.  

Hypocrisy microaggression alert!:

Republican claptrap → I hate spending, but gimme the cash

One can wonder why Democrats allow Republicans any pork at all. It is a mystery. Once the Republicans get back in power, it is reasonable to think that Democrats will get very little or no pork of their own. Guess the Dems have to learn the hard way. As Zuckerberg once said about people who used Facebook, Dumbfucks!

Alabama gets a lot of evil federal tax dollars

but won't complain about it one little bit

“I’m glad and proud of them,” said Mr. Shelby [R-AL], a legendary pork-barreler who has no fewer than seven buildings named after him in Alabama. The latest spending package adds another, renaming a federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa for him.

In March of 2021, the Brookings Institute wrote about earmarks:

Throughout much of the 2000s earmarking became synonymous with corruption. After a few high-profile scandals in the early part of that decade, Congress put additional rules into place in order to prevent such abuses. However, the conversation around earmarks was quickly hijacked. Some legislators and activists convinced Americans that earmarks served no purpose, were the cause of budget deficits, ballooned the budget, and were the well of legislative misanthropy.

The reality of earmarks is much different. First, they serve a real purpose, allowing legislators—who well understand the needs of their districts/states—to target funds for important projects that can solve policy problems and create jobs. Second, while abuses happen, the vast majority of earmarks were meant to respond to constituents’ concerns and needs. Third, earmarks have always composed a miniscule portion of the discretionary budget, typically less than one percent, and fall within a chairman’s mark—the top-line number set for an appropriations bill’s cost. Fourth, earmarks did not disappear with the so-called “earmarks ban” in 2011; it simply transferred the behavior to the executive branch or made them more secretive within the legislative branch. Fifth, earmarking is not a Democratic proposal. Democrats and Republicans have endorsed their use. It is also not a liberal proposal, as some of Congress’s most conservative members, like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) have defended their use and opposed the original ban.

In a very direct way, the earmark ban stripped power from the people and their representatives in Congress and made the practice more likely to be corrupted, not less so. Zachary Courser and Kevin Kosar wrote powerfully recently as to why legislators and their constituents should embrace the return of earmarks with appropriate safeguards. They also highlight some of the institutional challenges within Congress that occurred at the same time the earmark ban was in place. My research has highlighted that federal spending power is an ongoing competition between the legislative and executive branches and when Congress fails to direct spending in specific ways, the executive branch performs that duty for them. In that setting, legislative earmarks become presidential earmarks. In that sense, Republican House members and senators who oppose legislative earmarks are working to transfer additional power to allocate federal funds to Democratic President Joe Biden.