EDITORIAL: Congressional spending problem again rears its head

Remember when Republicans eliminated congressional earmarks? Well, they’re back — and many GOP members of Congress are wallowing in the muck.

According to The Hill, the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that passed the House last week “includes more than 4,000 earmarks … that spanned 367 pages.”

Earmark is another term for pork, a proposal in which money is set aside to benefit a single state or district in order to boost the political fortunes of the politicians who represent the area. Think: federal taxpayers funding the Lawrence Welk museum in North Dakota or the Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska.

A dozen years ago, House Republicans limited the practice in order to cull wasteful spending and improve budget transparency. But the temptation for members of Congress to “bring home the bacon,” particularly during an election year, has again proven too much to overcome.

“There’s been a decade of pent-up desire to get back to earmarks, and you’re seeing some of that come to fruition, particularly those people who were writing the appropriations bills, dealing with all of those type of issues and then not getting the gravy they certainly did earlier in their career,” Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, told The Hill.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, was among the most prolific earmarkers. His name “is attached to 59 earmarks totaling nearly $80 million in the omnibus’s transportation and housing and urban development (HUD) section alone,” The Hill found.

Not surprisingly, Democrats facing tough re-election battles eagerly sidled up to the trough. That includes Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who “successfully requested 15 transportation and HUD-related earmarks totaling $34.9 million and a $3 million earmark for Lake Mead in the energy and water development section,” according to The Hill.

On the GOP side, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who is retiring at the end of his current term, requested “only 16 earmarks but they totaled nearly $650 million.”

Defenders of earmarks argue that without them, the executive branch has too much discretion about where to direct funds. Sen. Mike Braun, an Indiana Republican who closely tracks such spending, doesn’t buy it. “I think it’s terrible,” he told the paper. “I think it’s emblematic of what’s wrong with the whole place, especially when you look at the top-line numbers that are out there and the record spending that we’re going to be putting forward in this omnibus bill.”

The country faces serious economic challenges. Yet Congress remains wholly unable to show even a modicum of fiscal restraint. It’s just more evidence that Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem.