Congress: Eats Pork while Driving Us All Off Cliff

Today Congress passed a “fiscal cliff” deal and in the next few days it will (finally) pass a bill with some aid for the Hurricane Sandy victims in N.Y. and N.J. Hidden in both bills are payoffs to members of Congress in exchange for their support. For example, there is money in the bills for Hollywood, some miscellaneous museums in states far from Hurricane Sandy’s impact, and a BIG chunk of money for some large banks and corporations who are “tickling the backs” of D.C. politicians. Here is how it works and we, the taxpayers, get screwed in the process. 

A pork (or “earmark”) project is a line-item in an appropriations bill. The pork part designates tax dollars for a specific purpose in circumvention of established budgetary procedures. There were over 11,000 pork projects in fiscal year 2008; they cost taxpayers $17.2 billion. (The contents below were originally written by the author in 2008-9.)

Why Do Many Members of Congress Use & Abuse Earmarks? There are four apparent reasons:

 A. To Get Re-elected. When a member of congress can siphon money from the other 49 states to fund projects in his or her own home district or state, he or she curries favor with the local voters and contributors. The results include votes for the incumbents as well as hard-$ campaign contributions from both voters and corporations that benefit from the infusion of federal money into the local situation. Here are few examples of typical pork projects:

— U.S. House member Ralph Regula earmarked $130 million for the Mary Rugla (his wife) Library in Canton, Ohio. The director of the library is Martha Rugula, the Rugulas' daughter.

— Congressman Charles Rangel swung a $2 million earmark to create a public service career center in his New York district. The name on the center: Rangel’s own, of course; it’s a nice billboard.

— And there was a $3 million pork project called “The First Tee” added to the 2008 Defense Appropriations Act. It provides for learning facilities and programs to teach young people the game of golf. This is an interesting addition to a defense bill; more than likely some golf- industry lobbyists persuaded (i.e. paid) one or more members of Congress to insert this earmark.

Here are two additional examples of some of the most egregious earmarks in recent times, both the handiwork of two of the recognized kings of pork: former Senator Ted Stevens (convicted of seven felonies in November 2008, for taking gifts from lobbyists) and U.S. House member Don Young (“Mr. Concrete”). Both are or were from Alaska. These “public servants” arranged for the now-famous “bridges to nowhere” to be included in federal highway bills.

— A $120 million down-payment for a Ketchikan bridge as big as the Golden Gate Bridge. The new bridge would connect a town with 7,000 people to an island with about 50 residents and the area’s airport, which offers six flights a day. This bridge would replace a five-minute ferry crossing. Pure pork.

– A $200 million down-payment for an Anchorage bridge that would span an inlet for nearly two miles to connect the city to a port that has but one regular tenant and virtually no homes or businesses. Pure pork.

Both of these beauties, actually passed by Congress, will or are being paid for by American taxpayers via the tax they pay on each gallon of gasoline they buy. And these projects are on the books now, at a time when high-volume roads and bridges across the USA are crumbling.

B. To Trade (buy and sell) Votes. Members of congress have to vote on expenditures of taxpayer money and other subjects throughout the year. There is a constant ebb and flow of influence and search for votes to favor or kill sponsored legislation. It is natural that the search degenerates, at times, for some members, into “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Translated, this means “I will vote for your pet deal…if you include my earmark in your package.” Or vice versa.

Earmarks are used as “internal bribery in order to get members to vote for legislation they wouldn’t ordinarily give two minutes to,” commented House member David Obey of WI, of the House Appropriations Committee.

The acknowledged vote broker for the U.S. House is member John Murtha of PA. According to the New York Times, he arranges things on “both sides of the aisle,” i.e., for Democrats and Republicans, and he often is able to influence swing votes in tight situations.

Murtha was re-elected in a close election on November 4th of 2008 for his seventeenth term (34th year) in the district around Johnstown, PA. He is the absolute master of defense bills pork. In 2007, he obtained $162 million in favors for his district, for 26 different beneficiaries.

According to the Washington D.C. publication, Roll Call, every one of the 26 beneficiaries—many of them in the defense industry—made contributions to Murtha’s campaign kitty, for a total of $413,250.

C. To Attract Campaign Money from “Special Interests.” U.S. House member, Jeff Flake, said in June in a Washington Post interview that: “One good defense earmark can yield tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions,” a practice Flake is actually fighting. Well known Senator, Joseph Liberman, a Connecticut independent, for example, secured more than $5.5 million in earmarks for his home state powerhouse, the United Technologies corporation. It responded to Liberman with $189,000 in donations.

Members of Congress have even found a new way to hide their activities from scrutiny. They can steer federal money to pet projects and favored organizations by making vague requests and “recommendations” to government agencies in committee reports and spending bills. These are appropriately called “soft earmarks,” as contrasted to hard earmarks. According to the New York Times on April 7, 2008: “How much money is requested or suggested for a specific project? It is difficult to say, since price tags are not included in soft earmarks. Who is the sponsor? Unclear, unless the lawmaker later acknowledges it. What is the purpose of the spending? This is typically not provided.”

Here are some of the little ideas members of Congress planted last year in a major spending bill having to do with U.S. foreign operations: 

— A shortwave radio station in Madagascar.

— A program to save hawks in Haiti.

— A program to fight agriculture pests in Maryland.

— An international fertilizer center in Alabama to assist overseas farmers.

There are lobbyists and contributors fingerprints all over each of these little jewels (just like on the current Fiscal Cliff and Sandy bills) for which American taxpayers will have to pay. The Congressional Research Service estimates there was $3 billion in soft earmarks in just one 2007 spending bill alone, and there were 13 such annual appropriations bills before Congress in 2007. “With soft earmarks, everything is done in secret.” So says Keith Ashdown, of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

D. To Play God. Dispensing favors to constituents, admirers, contributors, and “worthy” organizations most likely provides a heady feeling for the congressional favor-giver. One Presidential candidate called earmarks the “Beltway drug.” Doling earmarks out certainly must be more fun than doing the hard work of health care, national security, tax reform, debt reduction, boosting the economy, and so on, presumably the main work for the people for which members of congress were elected by the people.

In many respects, some members of Congress routinely play Monopoly with the tax money sent to Washington by American taxpayers, year in, year out. And according to Robert Reich, the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997, the game is breeding “an economy raised on pork.” He said this in 2005; the current economic quagmire may be the result of such a diet. (And now look at our situation as we start 2013.)

Author's Notes: Not all members of Congress participate in earmarks, and not all earmarks are necessarily "bad." But the idea and process of quasi-secret earmarks is both contagious and poisonous to a society with a government theoretically based on transparency and accountability.

FYI: The term "pork" originated in the 1800s when a pork barrel often was used to store food, e.g., salted pork. The notion behind the term's derogatory use in politics, starting in the 1800s, was that office seekers sometimes provided voters with "food" of some kind in return for votes.