Senate Battles Over Pork; Reid Calls Earmarks an 'Obligation'

As Senate Republicans moved to enact a two-year moratorium on earmarks this week, dissent roiled the ranks of Democrats and Republicans over the practice that allows individual lawmakers to designate federal funds for specific projects, usually in their states.

Although Senate Republicans have vowed to halt the practice, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid defended it Tuesday as the obligation of every member of Congress.

"I believe, personally, we have a constitutional obligation, a responsibility, to do congressionally directed spending. I do not feel comfortable turning that over to the people downtown," Reid said, referring to federal agencies that would assume the responsibility of designating federal funds in the absence of congressional direction. "So I am not going to back off of bringing stuff back to Nevada."

Reid derided the debate over eamarks as a "tremendous step backwards" and complained it would only take power away from Congress and give it to the president. "I am not in favor of delegating my constitutional responsibility to the White House," he said.

Reid would have been in good company in that opinion in years past, when members of Congress jealously guarded legislative prerogative and bragged about sending federal funds home to their districts.

But the rise of the conservative tea party movement and the Democrats' "shellacking" in the midterm elections have radically changed the politics of spending on Capitol Hill. In the fight to ban earmarks, the good money is now on lawmakers who want to spend no money.

The best sign of the new normal is the newly empowered tea party favorite, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who pushed his Senate Republican colleagues this week to adopt the moratorium and scored a huge victory when Minority Leader Mitch McConnell backed the ban after resisting similar ideas for years.

DeMint predicted Tuesday that the Republicans' agreement would keep GOP members of the House and Senate from voting for any spending bill with earmarks in it, a prospect that would kill nearly all legislation with pork projects buried inside.

"I don't think any of us are going to agree to allow the Democrats to take money for our states and send it to another state," DeMint said. "We've got to stop the whole process. Hopefully with the president at least saying he supports it, we can get the Democrats to come along, too."

One Democrat who will go along with DeMint is Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who wants the full Senate -- not just the Republicans -- to agree to the two-year earmark moratorium, an idea that has generated groans from most of her Democratic colleagues.

"I think it's important to be willing to rock the boat for reform in the institution," McCaskill said, explaining that she will try to force a vote on her amendment containing the moratorium in the lame-duck session, knowing that most Democrats are not on board with her. "Right now I'm confident I have one (vote). No, no, two!" she said, remembering that Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) has also endorsed the two-year ban. "I hope I'm surprised, but I am not confident."

Even if the full Senate agreed to a moratorium, the larger question remains whether it would reduce overall federal spending. All earmarks for 2010 amounted to less than one percent of the federal budget, and people on both sides of the debate agree that some members of Congress will always find a way to influence federal spending as long as they are in office, even if it's just with a phone call to a federal bureaucrat in charge of funding bridges and dams.

And even some Republicans maintain that all earmarks are not necessarily wasteful or wrong.

"Can I give you one example of where an earmark was wisely used?" Sen. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday, referring to his earmark to fund mine-resistant MRAP vehicles for Marines in Iraq. "I'm for the moratorium up to the point that it puts my nation at risk. If there is a national security issue that the moratorium affected in an adverse way, I will do what's necessary."

Sen. Kit Bond, the retiring Republican senator from Missouri who has lived through Senate battles large and small, joked that he knows of at least one man who is against earmarks. "(Terrorist) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a great opponent of earmarks," he said. "Because we earmarked for the F-16 that took (him) out. "