This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 30, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Warning that some lawmakers are trying to do end runs around the temporary moratorium on earmarks, U.S. Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., introduced a bill Wednesday that would impose a permanent ban.
McCaskill conceded that gaining approval for the bill would be tough - saying that neither Democratic nor Republicans leaders in the Senate want a vote - but she argued that the nation's interest in deficit reduction means that "to vote against a moratorium on earmarking right now would be a very dangerous vote."
At a Capitol news conference during which she took shots at the Democratic leaders of both the House and Senate, McCaskill said she was "shocked" when the House Armed Services Committee added what she described as "hundreds of earmarks" in May to its version of the 2012 defense authorization bill.
The committee's chairman, Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., denied that the $1 billion "Mission Force Enhancement Transfer Fund (MFET)" funded earmarks, arguing that it let "members of the committee that have the expertise move the funding around to more important items" by means of amendments.
An analysis by a watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste, later found that 59 of those 111 amendments had language nearly identical to that used to describe previous earmarks. Although the House later passed the defense bill, the earmark-like amendments were not funded by the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee.
McCaskill, who had condemned the MFET last spring as a "slush fund" for earmarks, said Wednesday that "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. And these were earmarks -- no question about it." She added that her office "will have more information on our effort to look at that problem in the coming weeks."
Bill Would Allow "points of Order" Against Earmarks
The Toomey-McCaskill bill defines an earmark as any congressionally directed spending item, limited tax benefit or limited tariff benefit. It would allow a new category of "points of order" in the Senate to allow any senator to raise an objection to a bill that contains earmarks. A supermajority of 67 votes would be required override such an objection.
Toomey, a member of the congressional "super committee" that failed to agree on a deficit-reduction deal before Thanksgiving, conceded at the news conference that eliminating earmarks -- estimated at about $32 billion in 2010 -- would not put much of a dent in the deficit. But he argued that "for years, earmarks played a role in fueling the overspending in Washington and undermining the integrity of our legislative process. We cannot afford to allow Congress to resume earmarking and playing pork barrel politics with taxpayer dollars."
The chairman of the Senate Appropropriations Committee, Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, was quoted recently as saying that he is "going to do everything to reinstate earmarks." Another powerful member of that panel, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the second-ranking Senate Democrat, also has said in the past that earmarks serve an important purpose.
Without further action, the current Senate and House moratorium on earmarks -- which does not carry the force of law -- is scheduled to expire at the end of 2012.
Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is among the senators whose influence might stand to benefit from a return of earmarks, which were favored by his predecessor, former Sen. Christopher Kit Bond, R-Mo.
But Blunt, who had supported earmarks during his years in the U.S. House, told reporters on Wednesday that he has respected the current Senate rules against earmarks and is not aware of any move to circumvent them. He took no position on the McCaskill/Toomey bill, saying he had not yet read it.
"I'm going to continue to fight for things that are good for our state," said Blunt, noting that backing more overall federal funding for levee repair would tend to help flood-ravaged states. "Overall levee funding is going to have a lot more impact on Missouri than it is Las Vegas," he said.
Blunt added: "In terms of funding where we say, 'Here's a specific project that has to happen at this specific location,' that's not happening right now as far as I know. And if it is, I believe we passed House and Senate rules against it. So the majority [Democrats] in the Senate should enforce those rules, and I'm not in the majority."
At her news conference, McCaskill said "there are many people around here who want to get back to 'business as usual' in terms of the earmarking process. That's why this legislation is necessary."
If lawmakers vote against the earmark measure, McCaskill said, "it would be an 'I don't get it' vote ... that tells the American people Congress is really out of touch." Referring to surveys that find most Americans regard Congress as dysfunctional, she added: "I think this would be the whipped cream and cherry on top of the dysfunction sundae."
Brunner, Missouri GOP Accuse McCaskill of Backing Bills with Earmarks
Even before McCaskill's news conference, a spokesman for GOP Senate hopeful John Brunner sent out a press release accusing the senator of voting for Senate bills over the years that included thousands of earmarks.
The spokesman, John Hancock, said McCaskill had wasted "billions" voting for bills that included "thousands of earmarks for things like manure research and tattoo removal."
In a separate statement, Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith made a similar accusation. "After voting for thousands of earmarks that cost taxpayers billions of dollars, Claire McCaskill now claims she wants to ban them," he said.
Asked to respond to the GOP criticism, McCaskill told the Beacon that "I never have requested or sought or gotten an earmark. But I also knew that, if I voted against every appropriations bill that had earmarks, I would never be able to vote for any appropriations bill. My vote, at that point, was not as meaningful as the fight I was waging to end the earmarking process."
During Wednesday's news conference, McCaskill she was criticized by many Senate Democrats when she tried, unsuccessfully, to delete an earmark sponsored by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., from a farm bill in 2008. And she said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are not likely to support a Senate vote on the earmark bill because "both of our leaders are former appropriators," who used to be players in the earmarking process.
GOP presidential hopeful and earmark critic Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said this week that she backs the Toomey-McCaskill legislation. "I wholeheartedly support the House moratorium on earmarks," Bachmann told the Washington Post. "Therefore, I commend Senators McCaskill and Toomey for introducing legislation which would ban earmarks in the upper chamber as well."
Another supporter is Brian Baker, president of Ending Spending Inc., which describes itself as a nonpartisan group that opposes wasteful government spending. "For too long, Washington has recklessly spent the taxpayers' hard-earned dollars on pork-barrel projects and this legislation would end this destructive practice once and for all," Baker said in a statement.