Some savvy political operative in the 1800s first rebranded the practice of funding government programs whose costs are spread widely to taxpayers, but whose service or economic benefits are concentrated in a particular geographic area, as “pork” (or occasionally, less-appealingly, as “pork-barrel spending”), and the term’s been with us ever since. Oh sure, its popularity ebbs and flows over time. I vaguely remember hearing jowled, red-faced men in ill-fitting suits screaming about pork on the 19” tube television set (with built-in VCR) that I had in my college dorm room. We haven’t heard much about congressional pork in quite some time though.
It looks like that’s about to change. In the early 2000s, congressional Republicans were livid about pork, leading to a complete ban on earmarks in 2011, with the Tea Party rising as a new force in American politics. An “earmark” is a legislative provision that spells out certain congressional spending priorities, spending priorities which will apply to very limited numbers of people, and while “earmark” is not technically the exact same thing as “pork,” the terms are more or less synonymous for our purposes (and we all have to recognize that “pork” is simply a more pleasing word than is “earmark”). The Tea Party had a few fair points, often embodied in the eventually abandoned “bridge to nowhere,” a $400 million pork project meant to connect an 8,000-person town in southwestern Alaska, one that was already served by a reasonably good ferry system, to the 50-person island that housed the nearest airport (this project was slipped into the federal transportation budget by the top House Republican on the Transportation Committee and the top Senate Republican on the Appropriations Committee, so one could argue that the posterchild for pork spending was more of an internal problem within the Republican Party than anything else).
At any rate, congressional pork (in the form of earmarks) has been gone since 2011, but now it might be making a comeback. A majority of House Republicans voted last week to revive earmarks, as long as certain new oversight requirements were met, including drafting a written justification for any particular project, verifying that the lawmaker proposing a project has nothing to gain financially from it, and appointing a federal watchdog to audit a portion of earmarks periodically. Democrats have also previously announced similar earmark reforms as part of their plan to bring back the practice.
Some Republicans remain highly skeptical, reverting to their role as pretend deficit hawks and forgetting that their beloved President Trump presided over the third-biggest increase in the size of the annual federal deficit relative to the size of the economy in all of American history (rounding out the top three deficit-spending presidents are George W. Bush, another modern Republican, and Abraham Lincoln, who, you know, had a Civil War to win). Yet, other Republicans are far more practical. And why not?
As the party out of majority power, Republicans aren’t going to be getting any of their major legislative priorities through. So, what they have to run on right now is playacting at hating Democrats the most of all, and stupid cultural issues like Mr. Potato Head and the fake cancelation of Dr. Seuss. I don’t think anyone thinks that is healthy for our democratic republic, or, if they are really honest about it, even for the Republican Party.
But what if we went back to the days when a Republican lawmaker could go home and say, “Look, I just couldn’t get there with banning abortion and mandating guns at church, but I did get this new bridge for our district that we really needed and couldn’t afford on our own”? That used to sort of work! And, “bridge to nowhere” notwithstanding, smaller communities often do legitimately need outside federal spending to fund local work on highspeed internet, airports, major highways, and other critical infrastructure (which is definitely some light socialism, but I won’t tell them if you won’t).
Bringing back congressional pork is not going to solve all of our political problems. But it might at least get the conversation started again. Right now, Republican lawmakers have no incentive to talk to Democrats, and Democrats have no reason to listen — neither stands to gain anything. Republicans are not going to sign onto a watered-down piece of progressive legislation, because “I made this bill that you hate something you might hate just slightly less,” is a very hard argument to make to voters. “I signed onto this bill because it was going to pass anyway and in doing so I got this large, local, tangible benefit that really helped you voters standing before me,” on the other hand? Now that’s something we can talk about.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The Link LonkMarch 25, 2021 at 04:17AM
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Is Greed Good? Comeback Of Congressional Pork Spending Might Resurrect Compromise, Bipartisanship - Above the Law
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