Earmarks

The early reporting on tonight's State of the Union Address is that President Obama will call for a complete ban on congressional earmarks.

That's not a surprise.

Not only would a proposed ban allow the president to grab an issue congressional Republicans have been trying to claim as their own, it would be a serious transfer of power from the legislative to the executive branch. 

No congressional earmarks mean that all decisions about what is spent will be left to the departments and agencies that get appropriations.  Needless to say, the departments and agencies are part of the executive branch and that's run by the president. So no congressional earmarks mean that any member of Congress who wants something spent in his or her district or state will have to ask/beg the White House for it.  It also means that the White House will be in a position to get something in return for the request like an agreement to support the president's position, to vote in favor of a nominee, to not oppose something actively, etc.

Is it any wonder that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D

My last Roll Call column for this year predicts what's ahead for the federal budget in 2011.  The full column is below, but the short answer is...nothing good, especially if your expectations were raised in recent weeks by commission reports, election results, and promises to do better.

My seven main predictions are:

Prediction: No matter what the incoming GOP majority has said and wants us to believe, the number and dollar value of earmarks in the next Congress will be at least as great, and probably more, than the amount from previous years.  

In fact, when you combine the following two items together, and it's hard not to realize that the only thing the announced GOP ban on earmarks is only going to accomplish is to drive them underground where they'll be harder to see...and even that's not certain.

First, Hal Rogers (R-KY), whose nickname on Capital Hill is "Prince of Pork," will be the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in the next Congress and, therefore, the new "Earmarker-in-Chief."  As Politico reports,

"Over the past two years, Rogers has requested $175,613,300 in earmarks, including funding for a cheetah protection nonprofit that his daughter works for.

***

As David Herszenhorn in the New York Times and Philip Rucker in The Washington Post have reported the past few days, it looks like earmarks are going to be one of the big budget topics this week as the GOP caucuses in the House and Senate both debate whether to ban their use.

Let me make it clear that I'm not a fan of earmarks.  But I'm less of a fan of those who demand that they be eliminated because doing so will cut spending.  As I've said before...eliminating earmarks absolutely doesn't reduce spending.  All it does is change the place where the spending decision is made from the legislative to the executive branch.

House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday made one of those statements on the federal budget that is nonsensical both in substance and style.  As reported by Steven Dennis in Roll Call, Boehner said "the GOP would 'end earmarking as we know it' if Republicans take the majority in November.  Later in the day, Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) said that earmarks were "emblematic of the culture of spending that has dominated Washington for far too long and must be reversed."

Two things are obviously wrong with Boehner's statement and Cantor's translation of it.

First, as I've written a number of times before (here and here, for example), eliminating earmarks does not reduce spending, it merely shifts the responsibility for allocating how an appropriation is spent from Congress to the executive branch.  Therefore, and completely contrary to wha