 I'm genuinely sick and tired of hearing sententious blowhards in both parties and in the media mindlessly railing on "earmarks" without any thought to what an earmark actually is. As I discuss in my latest article for In These Times magazine, the concept of an earmark is value neutral - there are good earmarks and there are bad earmarks, there are earmarks that are motivated by integrity, and there are earmarks that are motivated by pay-to-play corruption. However, there's one part of the earmark that we can make a decidedly positive value judgment on: the earmark's role in making sure the power of the purse is vested in the legislative branch, as the U.S. Constitution requires.
In recent years, we've seen an aggressive push to cite bad/corrupt earmarks as a justification for eliminating Congress's entire power to earmark spending bills - that is, to eliminate Congress's power to direct spending at specific programs.
The problem, of course, is that an earmark-free world would create the conditions for the same kind of corruption we saw with Jack Abramoff, only arguably worse - if Congress was forced to effectively legislate unearmarked block grants for the executive branch to earmark as it sees fit, special interests looking for government handouts would simply aim all their lobbying resources away from Capitol Hill and at federal executive branch agencies. If, after the Bush administration's behavior, you believe White House-appointed bureaucrats are automatically less corruptible than congresspeople, then I've got a bridge to nowhere and a Halliburton contract to sell you.
The point here isn't to defend bad earmarks or good ones - but to highlight the fact that spending decisions are going to be made by somebody, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that Congress is any less qualified to make spending decisions than the White House. In fact, there's the opposite - a reason called the U.S. Constitution that bases our democracy on giving spending authority to the branch of government closest to the people - ie. the legislative branch.
This isn't to say that the congressional earmark process doesn't need to be reformed - it certainly does. But it is to say that those politicians and pundits who are trying to use the need for reform to vest monarchical power in the White House are mounting a very serious assault on the separation of powers principle at the heart of our democracy.
Read the whole In These Times article here.
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