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At least not now

Ryan: No, House Republicans, you can't bring back earmarks



I wonder if the return of unified Republican government means we're going to start re-running all the same arguments we had a decade ago. If Valerie Plame comes out of the woodwork I'm really going to be irritated. But we're talking about earmarks again, if only because House Republicans seem to miss the little buggers an awful lot, and maybe they figured now that they have all the power again, it's time to go back to shoveling piles of federal money into their districts like they did in the good old days. Good for them, that is. Bad for the country.
The practice has been banned since Republicans first re-took control of the House in 2010, and at least least for the time being - grumbling of GOP House members notwithstanding - it's not coming back:
“After a long debate, it was clear there’s a lot of pent up frustration with ceding spending authority to the Executive Branch,” said the source in the room. “[The Speaker] said we just had a ‘drain the swamp’ election and cannot turn right around and bring back earmarks behind closed doors.” But while the votes have been delayed for now, it’s far from certain that Republicans will keep the earmark ban in place when a public vote is held next year. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he expects members to be just as supportive of overturning the earmarks ban in public as they were in private.

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“They need to come back,” said Cole, who is chairman of an Appropriations subcommittee. He said that even Ryan had seemed to acknowledge recently the growing demand among members to gain more control over spending bills. “I think it’s a helpful lubricant to the system,” he said. “It’s a way to take care of problems. Bureaucracies don’t always see the problems.”
That's an image I could have done without, but whatever. There actually is a conservative argument for earmarks, although to my mind it's not a very strong one. The argument goes that you've got all this money allocated for discretionary spending, and if you don't earmark it for specific projects wanted by members of Congress, all you're doing is ceding the discretion to the executive branch. The money will still get spent, but it will get spent on priorities chosen by the president or, worse yet, by bureaucrats. So, it's argued, better to let members of Congress earmark the funds because they're aware of specific situations in their districts that can really use the money. OK, that argument sounds reasonable on first hearing. But there are two massive problems with it. The first is that there's no reason to assume members of Congress are any more responsible than the administration in how they earmark the money. Sure, they know their respective districts better than the president does. But all that means is that it's easier to earmark funds on boondoggles that reward political supporters or otherwise make them look good. I remember some years back, members of the Michigan delegation were awfully proud of themselves for earmarking funds to preserve old Tiger Stadium. But there was no practical way to use the money, and ultimately Tiger Stadium was torn down. It made good press release fodder, but that's all it was. Lots of earmarks are like that. Their primary purpose is to make the congressman look good, not to really benefit the community in any meaningful way.

If Republicans are serious about limiting the size of government, then cut down on the budgeting of money for no particular reason

But there's a much stronger conservative rejoinder to this argument: If you're concerned about the president spending all these discretionary funds, don't allocate them in the first place. Simply leave them out of the budget. There's a tendency among members of Congress, regardless of party or ideological bent, to think that if you've always done a certain thing, you have to always do it, because "that's how it works in this town" or whatever. If Republicans are serious about limiting the size of government, then cut down on the budgeting of money for no particular reason. You can still have some money in the budget for unforseen needs. But that's not even what they do with the money that's earmarked. They don't leave it sitting there just in case of an emergency. They spend it, baby. And every congressman, even the most conservative, fights to make sure it gets spent in his or her district. We're not talking about a massive percentage of the overall federal budget. To affect that, you'd have to deal with entitlements, which is going to frighten the bejeezus out of everyone on Capitol Hill. But just because it's not a lot of money by Washington standards doesn't mean you should be spending it if there's no specific purpose for it. That's exactly the type of thinking that leads you to $4 trillion budgets. Cut it. That way no one spends it. If we're really going to change the way we do things in Washington, that's an obvious place to start.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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