With Joe Biden and the Democrat swamp creatures back in control of the levers of power in Washington, D.C., it was only a matter of time before one of the most wasteful, self-serving practices in congressional history reared its ugly head: earmarks. The liberal career politicians in charge of powerful committees on Capitol Hill simply couldn’t resist bringing the taxpayer-loathed earmark back from the dead. With congressional approval ratings averaging about 35 percent, perhaps Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer thought their numbers were getting a little too high.
The swamp-sanitized term for earmarks during their heyday in the 1990s and 2000s was “directed congressional spending.” Despite the euphemism, voters overwhelmingly despised the practice. In 2010, a CNN poll revealed that 79 percent of Americans – including 71 percent of Democrats and 89 percent of Republicans – found them unacceptable. It’s not surprising, as Americans of all political stripes tend to oppose politicians funneling our tax dollars to special interests in return for contributions and political support.
Earmarks became part of the rallying cry for the Tea Party movement that swept Pelosi from power in the 2010 midterm elections. This was the election that saw conservative outsiders like Mike Lee and Rand Paul elected to the U.S. Senate and dozens of reform-minded constitutional conservatives to the U.S. House. Earmarks became emblematic of what was wrong with Washington and the American people had gotten sick of it.
In response to the public outrage, Congress decided to ban the use of earmarks, also lovingly referred to as pork-barrel spending, in 2011. For the last decade, while Congress has failed on many other fronts, at least Americans knew that taxpayer funds could not be so brazenly used to enrich special interests in the Washington swamp. And the use of earmarks was, indeed, brazen. Between the mid ‘90s and 2011, the number of yearly earmarks tacked on to legislation to fund pet projects increased by 282 percent, from 4,155 in 1994 to a whopping 15,887 in 2011.
Banning earmark spending was wildly popular, fiscally responsible, and removed a prime incentive for legislators to prioritize lobbyists over their constituents. So why, then, is the Democrat Congress trying to resurrect the practice? Well, as I noted, the swamp is back and they’re using the left’s latest tactic to mislead voters into not paying attention to the return of old school corruption: redefining words. Earmarks aren’t coming back, they claim, but instead something called “community project funding.” The establishment has succeeded in redefining COVID relief, infrastructure and bipartisanship with the help of the liberal media, so why not try it with earmarks too? The bottom line is that today’s radicalized Democrats are too arrogant to care what hardworking American taxpayers think and that’s why they’re bringing back earmarks, period.
Make no mistake, whether they call the shady legislative maneuver “directed congressional spending” or “community project funding,” the wasteful nature of the earmarking process remains. Earmarks benefit lobbyists and entrenched politicians in Congress at the expense of their constituents. A study from BusinessWeek demonstrated that for every dollar spent by lobbyists, their clients received roughly $28 of our tax money. The news about the return of “community project funding” doesn’t have communities applauding, but it has lobbyists and Washington insiders cheering gleefully.
Thankfully, there is a coalition of responsible governance still to be found in the halls of Congress. Led by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, fifteen Senate Republicans pledged this week to uphold the ban on earmarks. The signatories, who include Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Rand Paul, vowed that they would “not participate in an inherently wasteful spending practice that is prone to serious abuse.” Their steadfast leadership prevailed on Thursday, when the Senate Republican caucus voted to uphold their own ban on earmarks. I applaud these Senators and know they will continue fighting against wasteful spending in the swamp.
Senator Lee is 100 percent correct when he says, “banning earmarks in 2011 was the first step in reforming Congress’s dysfunctional budget process. Much more work needs to be done, but backsliding into the corrupt and corrupting earmarks racket should not be an option.” And Senator Cruz deserves great thanks for speaking up about our national debt crisis in a city that prefers to ignore it: “Earmarks enabled party bosses to pass irresponsible and bloated spending bills that have plunged us into $28 trillion of debt.”
The American people will remember it was Congressional Democrats who decided to relaunch earmarks with their “community project funding” rebranding folly and will make them pay for it at the polls in 2022.