When pork was king
President Trump, playing his favorite role of agent provocateur, suggested to members of Congress this week that perhaps they’d all just get along better if they went back to the give-and-take of pork barrel politics by restoring the practice of budget earmarks.
And this from the guy who wanted to “drain the swamp” in Washington!
“Our system lends itself to not getting things done, and I hear so much about earmarks — the old earmark system — how there was great friendliness when you had earmarks,” Trump told a bipartisan meeting of lawmakers Tuesday. “Maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks.”
A few of the Republicans in the room — those with a sense of history — picked themselves up off the floor and moved to the topic at hand (on this day it was immigration). But sometimes there’s no keeping a wretched idea down.
Sure, there’s a case to be made that earmarks — special budget riders put in at the request of a specific lawmaker, usually for his district — are short money, a mere rounding error in the federal budget. And in the case of the Sparta (N.C.) Teapot Museum, (a mere half million dollars) perhaps that was the case.
But then again there was that $223 million “bridge to nowhere” — eventually scrapped — that was to link Ketchikan, Alaska, to an airport on the nearby island of Gravina.
But it wasn’t just the projects of dubious merit that gave earmarks a bad name. It was the corrupting effect on legislators sometimes acting on behalf of generous campaign contributors or even more generous lobbyists, who basically bought their earmarks — and federal taxpayers paid the bill.
Back-to-back scandals that sent then-U.S. Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.) to prison for taking bribes from military contractors and lobbyist Jack Abramoff to prison for offering “gifts” to lawmakers in return for favors and that infamous “bridge to nowhere” combined to help ban earmarks in 2011.
Oh, it’s not as if such things don’t exist at all any more. It’s Washington, after all, and the powerful still do exercise some influence. But the “ban” has eliminated the worst of the worst.
Trump’s romanticizing about the practice aside, this is no time to return to the bad old days.