It is mind boggling to think that after many, many years, the existence of congressional earmarks is in the middle of a new definition process. For as long as we can look back, almost all members of Congress – Senate and House of Representative – have participated in ‘earmarking’ monies in the Federal budgets for special projects in their home districts and states. It was commonly known as “bringing home the bacon”. In and of itself, a folksy expression for making sure that Federal money would flow back into the districts for projects or services the electorate had been promised by their respective Representative. And because they brought home the ‘bacon’, it became also known by another name as it was called “pork barrel spending”.
So far so good. Over time, ‘Earmarking’ became a dirty for budget hawks and people in general who felt that the government spent too much money and grew too large. As a result of that, some members of Congress distanced themselves from earmarking and proudly proclaimed that they would not participate in such extra budget spending. Some members even railed against this sort of spending and called for it to stop. The American public in general agreed with that position and expressed their unhappiness over that ‘wasteful’ spending by Congress. Every budget was over time accompanied with the amounts of earmark spending and its reputation got worse. With the current deficit spending by Congress (with nearly 1.5 trillion dollar deficits every year), this past election saw ‘earmarking’ as a heavy contributor of such deficits and many candidates promised their constituencies that they would not participate in ‘earmarking, period!
With the mid-term election behind us and with many ‘earmark’ opponents winning their respective races, the debate over this budget process has been transferred to Washington D.C. and with that we find out who is for and who is against the continuation of the use of earmarking. And with that comes a new insight into this process. We could be wrong but we believe it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who two weeks ago stated that earmarking did not add to the annual budgets. He continued that it was simply a matter of specifying certain budget items in specific districts or states; that is was Congress allocating monies for projects instead of letting these monies be doled out by governmental bureaucrats. To make this clearer: Instead of letting the Federal government agencies allocate the funds for what they seemed to be proper and more urgent, a Congressman (for his or her district) or Senator (for his or her state) would determine the allocation of certain funds for specific projects or programs. But it would not constitute extra money to be spend by the Federal government.
Common Sense University has to confess: This is a new one for us! And we now have to ask the question: Did the members of Congress know that? If the answer is YES, they should be recalled for false statements and lying to their constituents! If the answer is NO, they should be recalled for being too dumb to serve in Congress! And if the members of the media did know this, we simply should STOP reading their articles or STOP listening to their statements on television or radio, in other words no longer paying attention to the members of the press/media.
Of course, none of these recommendations of ours will come true but we can dream, can’t we? If nothing at all, we will be following developments on “earmarking” and its process. We also can discuss and talk about this congressional ’turkey’ with family and friends while we celebrate Thanksgiving this year. Happy Thanksgiving!