IS A PERMANENT EARMARK BAN REALLY PERMANENT? That’s the worry among Porkbusters old-timers when they hear that the Senate Republican Conference approved Sen. Ben Sasse’s permanent extension of former Sem. Jim DeMint’s 2011 moratorium.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Don’t refill the swamp by restoring earmarks, President Trump.

While President Trump wants to drain the swamp, his White House has been repeatedly checked by a gridlocked Congress. Now, Trump wants to grease the wheels a bit. He wants to bring back earmarks.

“I think we should look at a form of earmarks,” Trump told lawmakers gathered at the White House on Tuesday. “One thing it did is it brought everybody together.” The other thing it will do is permanently rebrand the party of fiscal responsibility into the party of graft, pork, and greed.

To be sure, earmarks make the legislative process a bit more efficient. And it’s understandable why a dealmaker like Trump would find them appealing as a negotiating aid. But they also lead to waste. Even the president admitted as much when he said that earmarks “got a little bit out of hand.”

When negotiations break down, obstructionists sell their votes for things like a $233-million bridge nobody needs, $3.4-million worth of tunnels for turtles, and $500,000 for a teapot museum. Old, greasy hands like former Rep. Charlie Rangel were even able to secure funding for personal monuments. That New York Democrat christened the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service with $1.9 million in taxpayer money.

Most lawmakers don’t remember, though. When some Republicans tried to bring earmarks back shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, warned that “63 percent of House Republicans have been elected since 2010” and as a result “have no personal knowledge or experience with earmarks.”

Those post-pork members didn’t witness the conservative crusade to end the practice. “If there’s a public vote [on earmarks],” former Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., warned me last February, “Republicans are going to get killed by some of these grassroots organizations out there now.” In other words, they can’t comprehend the rake they would be stepping on if they do this before the midterm elections.

That’s absolutely right.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Ryan stops vote on bringing back earmarks.

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Wednesday convinced Republicans to postpone votes on bringing back legislative earmarks until 2017 after reminding members of Donald Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington.

House Republicans were set to hold a secret ballot on changes to their internal conference rules that would have allowed lawmakers to direct spending to projects in their districts, under certain circumstances.

Based on what lawmakers were saying in the meeting, “it was likely that an earmark amendment would have passed,” according to a source in the room.

“Ultimately, the Speaker stepped in and urged that we not make this decision today,” the source said.

Behind former Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Republicans banned earmarks after winning the House in 2010, and have stuck by that policy despite grumbling from both sides of the aisle.

With the GOP now set to control Congress and the White House next year, some Republicans are agitating for change.

Reps. John Culberson of Texas, Mike Rogers of Alabama and Tom Rooney of Florida filed an amendment to GOP rules that would ease the earmark ban by creating a new process for targeted spending.

Remember those names, but for now, it’s another PorkBusters victory!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: House GOP Weighs Proposal to Bring Back Earmarks.

One week after Donald Trump won the presidency on a promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington, House Republicans will vote on a proposal to bring back earmarks.

The vote will take place Wednesday when House Republicans meet to adopt their rules for the next Congress. The House earmark ban dates to 2010 when the GOP won control of the chamber.

Now, a trio of Republican lawmakers wants to return to the practice of earmarking, which became synonymous with government waste and pork-barrel spending during the GOP-controlled Congress of the early 2000s.

Reps. John Culberson of Texas, Mike Rogers of Alabama, and Tom Rooney of Florida are listed as sponsors of the amendment, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily Signal.

Pathetic. Maybe these guys need to hear from people, especially constituents, about this? I didn’t think I was going to have to pull that PorkBusters logo out of deep storage, but hey, eternal vigilance, right?

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT:

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More on pork and corruption in the House:

Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, another conservative stalwart, tried unsuccessfully to strip millions of dollars worth of farm subsidies out of the bill. “I offered eight amendments and every single one got voted down,” he says.

After the defeat, Flake told the New York Times, “”We have one of our former members in jail right now for basically selling earmarks”—referring to disgraced former member Randy “Duke” Cunningham. “He was able to get his earmarks through the legislative process without being challenged. Jack Abramoff reportedly referred to the Appropriations Committee as an ‘earmark favor factory.’”

In response to these comments, the earmarks’ defenders told the Times that Flake’s comments were out of line.

1994. Again. Right? I mean, these guys were never rocket scientists, but when I see this many people acting this stupidly — and in the face of lousy approval ratings that should be getting their attention — I have to wonder what I’m missing.

UPDATE: More here from Jacob Sullum:

Like most of their colleagues, Bonilla and Obey think buying votes with other people’s money is perfectly honorable—indeed, something (unlike respecting the Constitution) they are obligated to do as the people’s representatives. Hence it is light years away from the blatant corruption represented by such malefactors as Cunningham and Abramoff. Flake’s point, which Bonilla and Obey pretended to miss, was that the earmark system, by allowing legislators to quietly slip in funding for pet projects, invites such corruption.

But pork is also a form of corruption in itself, involving the use of taxpayer money not to perform the legitimate functions of the federal government but to serve the legislator’s own interest–in this case, staying in power, which brings with it all sorts of perks. Cunningham did pretty much the same thing, bringing federal money to his district at the behest of his constituents, except that he got some additional goodies in the process. If the actions are the same, does the antique armoire make all the difference?

To some people.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE:BYRON YORK: In tough Senate race, pork couldn’t buy Landrieu victory. Neither the Louisiana Purchase nor the Cornhusker Kickback was enough to overcome the toxic effects of voting for ObamaCare. That’s because ObamaCare was that toxic, but perhaps also in some small part because people are less receptive to pork. And so Cassidy countered with the “post pork paradigm.”

So I guess it’s time to bring this flag out one more time.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Earmark Ban Hits Lobbyists’ Influence on Spending Bills.

If the lobbying world of K Street was as powerful as its public image, earmarks would be back in full force in Congress — or, maybe, they never would have gone away.

The modern lobbying business was built largely on helping clients secure member- directed pots of money in annual appropriations bills. And many of the firms that pioneered the practice have taken a serious hit since lawmakers banned earmarks in 2010.

But don’t expect K Street to mount a high-profile, big-dollar campaign to bring them back. Instead, in private meetings with members of Congress and their aides, lobbyists say they offer a pitch for how earmarks could help lawmakers, who are often frustrated that they can’t direct money to their districts, wrest more control of federal dollars.

And those making the case for earmarks aren’t just the ones whose paychecks depended on appropriations work.

Uh huh. Eternal vigilance, etc. But that they’re still trying to bring earmarks back means that, well. . .

WELL, THIS WAS THE POINT OF THE TEA PARTY’S PRECURSOR, PORKBUSTERS: Tea Party loosens K Street’s stranglehold on the GOP.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Earmarks Still Have Friends In High Places.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Earmark recipients filled Akin campaign coffers. “People for whom U.S. Rep. Todd Akin helped secure $31 million in earmarks have paid him back handsomely: The Missouri Republican has raked in nearly $80,000 in campaign cash from people tied to those firms. The five-term representative is in a hotly contested primary race for the Republican nomination to oppose incumbent Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill, one of the Senate’s most ardent earmark foes.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Earmarks to Return if GOP Porkers Get Their Way. “Proving they’ve learned nothing from lessons of the past, some House Republicans are pushing to bring back the wide-scale use of earmarks to Congress. These pigs in elephants’ clothing want to end a three-year moratorium on earmarks and start trading pork projects for votes in order to pass legislation, even though their big spending, earmarking ways during the George W. Bush era cost them dozens of elections.”

I guess it’s too late to primary them. This time.

AN ALERT FOR PORKBUSTERS AND SPACE ACTIVISTS ALIKE: Fight the “Space Launch System” Earmark!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Impact of Earmark Ban Already Being Felt:

When House Republicans were searching for cuts to offer Senate Democrats as part of a temporary spending plan to avert a government shutdown, they were able to reach into accounts set aside for earmarks and find nearly $2.8 billion that would have previously gone to water projects, transit programs and construction programs. No earmarks, no need for that money, and the threat of an imminent shutdown was eased.

Lawmakers said the absence of earmarks also allowed for a more freewheeling debate on the House floor during consideration of the Republican plan to slash $61 billion from this year’s budget since Democrats and Republicans were not caught up in protecting the special provisions they had worked so hard to tuck into the spending bill.

“This is a completely new experience, and a good one,” said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who had lost scores of attempts on the House floor to strip earmarks from spending bills.

While spending on earmarks is a tiny portion of the budget, critics like Mr. Flake and Mr. Boehner said they played an insidious role in pushing up federal spending through what is known in legislative terms as logrolling. . . .

Top members of the Appropriations Committee might, for instance, grant a lawmaker’s request for a few million dollars for an important project back home. That lawmaker would then be obligated to support the entire multibillion-dollar bill despite possible reservations. . . .

“You get millions for an earmark and end up voting for billions of dollars that you may oppose,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group.

Can I just say I told you so? Because, you know, I did.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Retrospective: How Earmarking Went From Stylish To Banned.

It may have looked like boom times for earmarkers in 2006, when they carved out a record $29 billion in projects — but little did lawmakers realize that a perfect storm of events the year before had set the clock ticking on pork.

What one anti-earmark operative called the “perfect storm” of runaway spending, lawmaker malfeasance and high-profile bad spending in 2005 set the stage for the slow decline of earmarking, culminating in this year’s moratorium on the practice.

It’s not “mission accomplished” time, because I’m sure they’d like to return to their old wicked ways. But it is a victory.

PorkBusters victory logo by Karl Egenberger, a great designer who also did the original PorkBusters logo. If you’re looking for a designer, send him some work!

UPDATE: GOP Freshmen to Leadership: Business As Usual Is Over.

Related: Freshmen to GOP leadership: We were serious about ‘read the bill.’

Plus, no more voting Present: “I mean I knew it was coming up. I could have just said ‘I’m here’ and not hit ‘yay’ or ‘nay.’ But I hit the ‘no.’ The big thing that we have to do is make sure that anything we’re voting for we know darn sure what we’re voting for.”

ED MORRISSEY ON THE OMNIBUS BILL’S DEATH: Thank PorkBusters.

How often do omnibus spending bills go down to defeat? Approximately … never, as Dave Weigel reminds us, and pork is usually the reason why. Not only do omnibus bills appear only when the budgeting process has failed and funding becomes an urgent issue, they also get so large and stuffed with perks that few dare to challenge them.

In this case, though, earmark reformers got the edge thanks to the series of measures designed to impose transparency on pork requests. . . . this result vindicates the efforts of Porkbusters. When the outrage became high enough and transparency identified the offenders, the porkers abandoned their earmarks. As a result, we will see a reduction in spending, thanks to the new GOP majority in the House. The omnibus spending bill, chock-full of not just earmarks but funding for big-government programs, won’t be passed into law after all. Without pork, legislators will have no incentive to pass massive new spending by excusing it with self-promoting home district projects any longer, and the overall spending itself will become the focus — as it should have been all along.

The system worked. This was always going to be a long game on pork reform, and this is the first fruit of an effort started years ago.

Indeed.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: McConnell Fights GOP Earmark Ban.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is maneuvering behind the scenes to defeat a conservative plan aimed at restricting earmarks, setting up a high-stakes showdown that pits the GOP leader and his “Old Bull” allies against Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and a new breed of conservative senators.

In a series of one-on-one conversations with incoming and sitting senators, McConnell is encouraging his colleagues to keep an open mind and not to automatically side with DeMint, whose plan calls on Senate Republicans to unilaterally give up earmarks in the 112th Congress, according to several people familiar with the talks.

While McConnell is not demanding that rank-and-file Republican senators vote against the earmark ban, he’s laying out his concerns that eliminating earmarks would effectively cede Congress’ spending authority to the White House while not making a real dent in the $1 trillion-plus budget deficit. And McConnell is signaling his concern about the awkward politics of the situation: even if the DeMint moratorium passes, Republican senators could push for earmarks, given that the plan is nonbinding and non-enforceable.

PorkBusters kind of morphed into the Tea Party movements, and now the Tea Party Patriots are asking the following:

Call these 7 GOP Senators now, tell them to VOTE TO BAN EARMARKS – Mitch McConnell (KY) (202) 224-2541, Jim Inhofe (OK) (202) 224-4721, Lindsey Graham (SC) (202) 224-5972, Lamar Alexander (TN) (202) 224-4944, Jon Kyl (AZ) (202) 224-4521, John Barrasso (WY) (202) 224-6441, John Thune (SD) (202) 224-2321.

Seems to be getting some traction already . . . .

UPDATE: Maybe this reminder, courtesy of the Asheville Tea Party, will focus their attention.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Inhofe gives his side.

MORE: Roll Call picks up the story. I noticed before that there was more media interest in PorkBusters back when it was criticizing Republicans. I’m glad for the attention, but . . . .

STILL MORE: Reader Bill McConnell writes: “Here’s my proposal. Decide how much you want to spend on earmarks and divide it by population to calculate how much each state gets. Then it goes into a stand alone bill which each congressman must either vote yea or nay on. I think in the current environment there would end up being NO earmarks.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: UNIVERSITY CAN’T ACCOUNT FOR MILLIONS IN MISSING EARMARK DOLLARS:

S.C. State University’s board voted unanimously Tuesday to conduct an external audit on the James E. Clyburn University Transportation Center to find out how millions of state and federal dollars have been spent. . . . The audit will be the first comprehensive review of the center, through which more than $50 million has flowed since it was launched in 1998. S.C. State leaders have about half that money on hand for the building’s first phase. But they’ve been unable to explain where the rest of the money went. . . . John Smalls, the university’s senior vice president of finance and facilities, estimated the report would cost about $100,000. He said the university might be able to get approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation to use grant money to pay for the audit.

Good grief.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Harvard Study Shows Earmarks Cost Jobs.

Using data spanning four decades, Harvard researchers measured the effects on local businesses as their local congressmen grew in stature in Washington. The study correctly assumed that when a senator or representative acquired a powerful committee assignment, he would exploit his new position to funnel more money to constituents back home. But the Harvard researchers also assumed — incorrectly, they would discover — that local businesses in a member’s home state or district would benefit from opening up the federal largesse.

“It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman’s state did not benefit at all from the unanticipated increase in spending,” said Joshua Coval, one of the study’s three principal authors. In fact, the study found that in the years following a congressman acquiring a powerful committee assignment, the average company in his state cut back capital expenditures by 15 percent. In one prominent example, Alabama went from receiving $6 million less in annual earmark spending than other states to $90 million above the state average after Republican Sen. Richard Shelby assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1997. Shelby earmarked $15 million for low-cost fabricated housing, but the study found that one of Alabama’s largest suppliers of this housing, Homes Inc., correspondingly reduced capital expenditures by 79.5 percent and downsized its work force by 30 percent.

Coincidence? Not likely. “The pattern repeats itself across decades and over thousands of firms.”

It’s all about the welfare of the political class and its cronies, it’s not even about “taking care of the district.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Citizens Against Government Waste praises the new earmark moratorium:

“CCAGW supports this step on the journey toward the complete elimination of congressional earmarks,” said CCAGW President Tom Schatz. “Over the last three years, under intense pressure from taxpayers, member of Congress have been ratcheting down their earmarks and the earth has not stopped rotating on its axis. With each reduction, members confirm what CCAGW and other taxpayer groups have been saying all along: Historically, Congress has not had to earmark in order to do the taxpayers’ business and that Congress can, and should, live without earmarks.”

In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last week called for a one-year moratorium on all earmarks but has not made any specific proposal to implement her plan.

Fewer earmarks are better earmarks.

Related: House GOP Votes to Ban All Earmarks.

HEY, REMEMBER PORKBUSTERS? So I was talking to a reporter about the Tea Party movement yesterday, and he asked why nobody was complaining about spending under Republicans. Well, I remarked, there was the whole PorkBusters movement, whose biggest target was probably Trent “I’m damned tired of Porkbusters” Lott. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I had forgotten about that.”

So here’s a reminder. And a few other items here and here. And I noted to him that CNN was a lot more interested in having me on back when I was criticizing Republicans for spending . . . .

UPDATE: Reader Karl Egenberger writes: “And, don’t forget, the PorkBusters logos was done by Karl Egenberger, send him some work!”

(Bumped from Feb. 12th, because apparently people still need reminding.)

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: QUID PRO QUO. In e-mails, lobbyists perceive ties between campaign cash, earmarks.

In summer 2007, for example, senior executives at a small McLean defense firm tried to figure out which of them would buy a ticket to a wine-tasting fundraiser for Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), a member of the Appropriations subcommittee on defense. At the time, the company sought help from Moran’s office in securing contracts through special earmarks added to the defense bill.

In an e-mail exchange, one senior officer said he didn’t understand why he had to attend the fundraiser when he didn’t even drink wine.

“You don’t have to drink,” Innovative Concepts’ chief technology officer, Andrew Feldstein, shot back in an e-mail. “You just have to pay.”

“LOL,” responded the other officer.

Yeah, real funny. “Moran raked in $91,900 in campaign checks to his personal campaign and leadership PAC that day. He secured an $800,000 earmark for Innovative Concepts in the 2008 defense appropriations bill.”

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: No dip in earmarks despite White House push for transparency.

Transparency requirements pushed for by the Obama administration have not changed the total spending on earmarks for 2010, according to a study by a group critical of the practice.

The amount of money directed by lawmakers in 2010 to specific projects back in their districts adds up to $15.9 billion, according to the analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense. . . . As a presidential candidate, Obama called for cutting earmarks down to their 1994 levels, or about $8 billion. He has since called for a competitive bidding process for earmarks going to for-profit companies, a move that has been adopted by the House but not the Senate.

Worse yet, the earmarks are vote-buying tools to promote the passage of huge spending bills. It’s not the amount of spending the earmarks embody, it’s the big-government corruption that they enable.

A TEA PARTY LOGO from Karl Egenberger, who also created the PorkBusters logo.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Cleaver earmark puts into focus one peril of politics.

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver likes earmarks.

His rule: If they come to his district, federal funds are well worth wrangling over, especially for infrastructure repairs and nonprofit causes.

But how does an East Coast software company qualify for a Cleaver earmark?

For two years, the Kansas City Democrat has secured earmarks totaling about $2 million with the aim of supplying a south Kansas City defense plant the latest in design software technology.

What seemed to him an easy chance to bring home some bacon, however, turned into a lesson on why earmarks are so controversial and difficult to follow.

For starters, the local plant he sought to help — the federally owned Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies Kansas City Plant — never asked for the money, plant officials said. . . . In tracing the origins of one little earmark — just a drop in a $7.7 billion bucket of pet projects earmarked in Congress’ recent omnibus spending bill — The Kansas City Star found that a lobbying group working for Massachusetts-based Parametric pushed for the funds.

That lobbyist, known as The PMA Group, is under federal investigation for its dealings with lawmakers. It was a major campaign donor to an Indiana congressman and others who served on the appropriations panel that signed off on Cleaver’s earmark.

Read the whole thing. And note the Visclosky connection.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: This sounds promising. Reps. look to cut ties between earmarks, donations:

Two reform-minded Democrats will introduce a bill Wednesday to address the growing controversy around the corruptive influence of earmarks and campaign donations from the companies that receive them.

Reps. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who are in their second terms, are co-sponsoring a measure that would prevent lawmakers from taking campaign contributions from entities for which they have requested earmarks, as well as the entities lobbyists and employees.
The members are among more than two-dozen Democrats who have supported a resolution anti-earmark crusader Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) has offered seven times in the past two months. The measure would force the ethics committee to investigate the nexis between campaign contributions from embattled PMA Group lobbyists and its employees and the earmarks lawmakers’ requested for PMA clients.

PMA Group shut down after the FBI raided its Northern Virginia offices last year and is reportedly investigating fraudulent campaign donations from so-called straw donors. The firm had showered millions of dollars in campaign donations on members of Congress and its clients received hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks in return.

PMA beneficiaries include John Murtha, Jim Moran, and Pete Visclosky.