Even Trump thinks earmarks have a place
President Trump finally got one right: by all means Congress should bring back earmarks.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, earmarks are those little nuggets of Congressional appropriations slipped into the federal spending stream by members of Congress which typically pay for purely local projects overlooked in the budgets submitted by the executive branch.
Earmarks are seen by some people, including President Trump (though he may be singing a different tune any minute now), as the lubricant that allows the Washington merry-go-round to spin gleefully along.
“You know,” Trump said at a (televised) White House meeting with lawmakers early last week, “our system lends itself to not getting things done. And I hear so much about earmarks, the old earmark system, how there was a great friendliness when you had earmarks.”
“In the old days of earmarks,” he continued, “you can say what you want about certain presidents and others .?.?. they went out to dinner at night, and they all got along, and they passed bills. That was an earmark system. And maybe we should think about it.”
Earmarks were temporarily abandoned by House Democrats in 2007. The earmark ban was imposed by Republican Speaker John Boehner in 2011.
The Club for Growth, the conservative lobby that helped push the recent supply-side tax cut monstrosity through Congress, tried to throw cold on Trump’s remarks.
Calling earmarks “the antithesis of draining the swamp,” Club for Growth president David McIntosh said, ironically enough, “the special interests” were sure to benefit “at the expense of working men and women” in the event earmarks were raised from the dead.
Several Freedom Caucus types also spoke in opposition.
On the other hand, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican and chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee on transportation and housing, said, “Where do I sign?”
The Senate Democratic whip, Dick Durbin of Illinois, agreed with Trump’s assessment of the importance of pork in days of yore. “It worked,” he said.
You bet it worked, at least as far as helping communities. To take one local example: Uniontown’s George C. Marshall Plaza at Five-Corners was going nowhere until Rep. John Murtha threw a $100,000 earmark into the pot.
The Murtha earmark sparked donations from other sources, including a large check from Richard Mellon Scaife.
Go ask the people of Cambria County how much Murtha earmarks meant to them in the aftermath of the devastating Johnstown flood of 1977. The answer they’ll give you is easy to predict: plenty.
I suspect officials there would welcome a fresh infusion of federal dollars today to help fund a $2.5 million overhaul of the Johnstown (1889) Flood Museum.
The incomparable author and historian David McCullough has endorsed the renovation in a video on the web; but if only Johnstown had a champion in Congress, if only Jack Murtha and congressional earmarks were still kicking … ah, there’s the rub.
I recall speaking with then-Rep. Tim Murphy at Arnold Palmer Airport outside Latrobe just after the earmark ban was put in place. The roads leading to the airport needed updated. Murphy, a Republican recently disgraced and forced to resign, told me then that without earmarks he was hamstrung as to what he could do.
Congressional earmarks and logrolling have a long and honorable history. Back in 1956, then-Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson traded Nevada tungsten for a bill establishing Social Security disability benefits.
The organ donor bank was started from an earmark. The use of drones by the Air Force was an earmark.
“At least in numbers if not dollars,” Mark Harkins of Georgetown University told me in an email, “the vast majority (of earmarks) went to hospitals for infrastructure, towns and counties for community development, (and) colleges and universities for research … to name a few.”
There are some who say earmarks should not be reinstated in the absence of other fixes. Former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer tweeted last week that “earmarks without campaign finance reform is a recipe for disaster.”
The Hastert rule in the House (bills require a majority of the majority party for passage) and the constant threat of a Senate filibuster (necessitating the 60-vote threshold) might have to go, though an argument can be made that the return of earmarks would have the effect of naturally eroding these impediments to historical legislative norms.
The beast of rabid partisanship needs curbing. Earmarks just might help.
President Trump has a real talent for stepping in it, but he may have came up with a gem in his remarks about earmarks. The House Rules Committee will hold hearings this week on the subject.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.