Earmarks: The Reluctant Case for Ending the Ban

“I haven’t seen so much lard,” said Ronald Reagan, “since I handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair.” It was March 1987, and the president was using his weekly radio address to blast a highway spending bill he’d just vetoed. The next month 13 Republican senators deserted him by voting to help Democrats override the veto. As the late Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat legendary for bringing money home to West Virginia, told his chamber: “Potholes know no party.”

Congressional pork is hard to define with any precision. One man’s sop is another man’s overpass. But earmarks, the specific instructions that Congress tacks onto its spending bills in order to tell the president exactly where in the country the money they’re approving must be spent, are easy to identify and target. Since the days of Byrd, both Congress and the public have soured on them. After the Republicans took back the House in 2010, Congress banned earmarks outright. In the two years since, it’s done nothing but tie itself up with a supercommittee, a sequester, and continued promises to fix things in the future. Political hacks used to say pork was the political grease that lubricated legislative deals. Only now do we see how true that was. Would it really be so terrible to reintroduce some congressionally sanctioned bribery? That would let members lay claim to the odd million in the interest of striking a deal worth much more.