McCain and
Coburn last Wednesday proposed a revolutionary change in the way
Congress has done more and more of its business over the past
two decades. They announced their intention to "challenge"
future earmarks as a violation of Senate rules. That would have
meant a roll call vote on each of the 15,268 special spending
items in 2005 (nearly a four-fold increase over the previous decade)
that individual members quietly slipped into massive bills in
the dead of night.
McCain,
a lonely voice in the Senate battling the bipartisan taste for
pork, was joined last year by newly elected Dr. Tom Coburn, the
flinty obstetrician from Muskogee, Okla. Even their combined voices
probably would not have been heard were it not for the Jack Abramoff
lobbyist scandal. Now, the demand for pork by politicians that
consumed $27 billion last year could be endangered.
Make no
mistake that Republicans McCain and Coburn are climbing uphill
against a bipartisan pork coalition, as was made clear from both
sides of the aisle this week. "Who knows best where to put
a bridge or a highway or a red light in their district?"
said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, defending earmarks on the Michael
Reagan radio program. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said
on PBS: "There's nothing basically wrong with the earmarks.
They've been going on since we were a country."
Coburn disputes
Reid's history. "Contrary to conventional Beltway wisdom,"
the freshman senator said, "the pork process is not an ancient
tradition that is impossible to change." The 1982 highway
bill contained 10 earmarked pork projects; 150 earmarks in the
1987 bill helped provoke a veto by President Reagan; the number
rose to 1,400 in 1998, and to 6,300 in 2005.
In an age
of polarization, addiction to pork cuts across party lines. The
$2 million for a public park in the Presidio of San Francisco
added to Defense spending benefits the district of House Democratic
Leader Nancy Pelosi, a leading attacker of Republican fiscal irresponsibility.
McCain took
the floor last Dec. 20, as he has so many times in the past, with
an inattentive Senate prepared to pass a $458 billion Defense
Appropriations Bill, including funds for the war in Iraq. "During
a war, in a measure designed to give our fighting men and women
the funds they need," said McCain, "the Congress has
given in to its worst pork-barrel instincts." These were
among the earmarks he pointed out:
-- $3,850,000
for the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Foundation at Manhattan's Pier
86 on West 46th Street in New York City. The district is represented
by liberal Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney.
-- $4.4
million for a technology center at Missouri State University in
Springfield, Mo. This was included in $27.1 million earmarked
for Southwest Missouri in this one bill by Acting House Majority
Leader Roy Blunt, who is running for the permanent leadership
post.
-- $500,000
for an outdoor grade-school teaching project ("Summer Science
and Adventure Camp") in Boswell, Pa. The district is represented
by Democratic Rep. John Murtha, who has become a leading critic
of President Bush's Iraq policy.
-- $500,000
for the Arctic Winter Games, an international sports competition
on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. Sen. Ted Stevens, president
pro tem of the Senate and chairman of the Defense Appropriations
Subcommittee, determined this was a fitting expenditure for a
military supply bill.
These are
just samples of what McCain and Coburn want to force their colleagues
to approve or disapprove. The other senators will hate that ordeal,
but neither McCain in his four-term Senate career nor Coburn in
his previous six years in the House has ever wanted to win a popularity
contest. They can tell the other senators that if they want to
avoid the embarrassment of voting on pork, they can stop earmarking.
