The Case Against Earmarks

RESTRICT EARMARKS — (House of Representatives – March 14, 2008)

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The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Flake) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. FLAKE. Mr. Speaker, I just want to say a few things about earmarks this week.

Yesterday was not a banner day for Congress. In the House, we approved a budget that had no restrictions on the contemporary practice of earmarking.

In the Senate, they turned down an amendment which would have placed a moratorium on earmarks. It went down bad. It went down 71-29.

There will come a day, and I think it will come soon, when we get rid of the contemporary practice of earmarking.

Now, many in the other body and in this body have tried to defend earmarking by saying that this is a constitutional prerogative, and somehow suggesting and even, some have said, that the Founding Fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they knew we were contemplating a moratorium on earmarks, as if to equate all Federal spending or Congress' power of the purse with earmarking.

There is a place for earmarking. There is a place for Congress to say to an administration, you are not adequately addressing this area; therefore, we are going to go through the process of authorization, appropriation, and oversight and tell you how we want money spent.

But that's not the contemporary practice of earmarking. The contemporary practice of earmarking is all about hiding your spending, not going through the process of authorization, appropriation and oversight, but rather to circumvent it. That's what it's all about.

When you have a bill that comes to the floor, as we did last year and the year before and the year before, several years with up to 2,500 or 3,000 earmarks in them placed just hours before the bill comes to the floor, that is not the appropriate role of Congress; that is not power of the purse that should be exercised.

That's an attempt to hide spending and to spend in a way that will benefit you politically. That is simply wrong, and I would suggest that the contemporary practice of earmarking, everybody knows it when they see it.

The difference between the proper use of an earmark and an improper use is whether or not you are attempting to hide funding, attempting to have funding slip through the cracks that nobody sees, rather than saying that we are going to authorize, then we are going to appropriate, and then we are going to have oversight.

Another myth that is often put forward is that we have to earmark because that's how we maintain control or oversight on the administration when, in truth, the contemporary practice of earmarking means that we do far less oversight. You can look at it empirically. Over the past decade, decade and a half, as we have seen a ramp-up in the area of earmarking, we have actually seen far fewer oversight hearings in the Appropriations Committee. Believe me, when you have 26,000 earmark requests a year for the Appropriations Committee in the House to deal with, you don't have time or resources or the inclination to do the proper oversight on the rest of the budget.

By earmarking, we are basically giving up our power of the purse. We are giving up our prerogative just to be able to earmark what amounts to about 1 percent of the Federal budget. We are effectively giving up control of the rest of the Federal budget. When you hear people say that we have to keep earmarking the way we are doing in order to control the Federal bureaucracy, that simply doesn't square with reality.

The contemporary practice of earmarking, as we have seen it over the past several years under Republicans and under Democrats, has been a way to hide spending for individual Members' benefits. It has led to corruption, it has led to scandal and will continue to do so until we end it.

I would encourage Members of the House and say that we are going to get there soon enough. People across the country know that this is the wrong thing to do.

Senator McCain made the statement yesterday that there is only one town in America that doesn't understand that this is wrong, and that town is Washington, DC. Everywhere else across the country, people understand that this is a practice that has to stop.

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