The Siren Song of Earmarks

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Madam Speaker, ever since the Magna Carta, it has been a settled principle of good governance that the power that appropriates public funds should not be the same power that spends them. This is at the heart of our Constitution, the separation of powers.

Simply speaking, it is mother's rule writ large. Mother has one slice of pie left and two hungry sons. How does she cut the pie so that both brothers are satisfied? One slices, the other chooses. One brother cannot abuse his powers precisely because of the powers accorded to the other.

And it is the same with our Constitution. One brother makes law, but cannot enforce it; the other enforces law, but cannot make it. One brother appropriates money, but cannot spend it; the other spends money, but cannot appropriate it.

Now, imagine how differently mother's rule would work if the same brother who sliced the pie also chose his piece.

Yet that is exactly the principle of congressional earmarks: Choosing the same slice of pie you have just cut or, more precisely, spending the same money that you have just appropriated. Nearly 1,500 earmarks, totaling $5.7 billion, have been dropped into the so-called infrastructure bill alone since a bipartisan spending frenzy revived this corrupt practice this year.

This monumentally bad idea rests on two arguments. The first is that elected Members of Congress, and not unelected bureaucrats, should spend the people's money. The problem, of course, is that Representatives aren't elected by all the people, only by their distinct constituencies. Representatives are inherently biased toward their own districts. That is why Congress is designed to act collectively.

Only the executive answers to the entire Nation and can resist the manifest excesses of a body controlled by 535 demanding constituencies and their district-focused Representatives. That is why appropriating money is a congressional function, and spending it is an executive one.

The second argument is that earmarks can grease legislation by buying off the votes of individual Members whose judgment would otherwise oppose a measure. Add a few local projects for that Member, and suddenly a bill he would never vote for on its merits becomes a local imperative overriding his sound judgment.

Please explain to me how that is a good thing.

And if earmarks are to be handed out as a reward for voting legislation, Members will prudently keep a list of earmarks handy as the demand for vote for any bill, whether or not they already plan to vote for it.

And this is not a theoretical discussion. We have learned the hard way what comes from breaching the Constitution's checks and balances.

The first problem is the corrupting nature of earmarks. When we place the power to appropriate and the power to spend in the same hands, we bypass the most important check that we have against corruption.

A local company produces a product the Pentagon neither needs nor wants.

Well, what to do?

Ingratiate yourself with the local Congressman; have him tell the Pentagon what it needs and who will provide it; and then reward him lavishly at election time and repeat. It should come as no surprise that many of the congressional scandals of the 1990s and 2000s arose from earmarks.

Second, earmarks bypass the normal process in which projects compete on their merits. Worthy projects don't need earmarks if appropriations are spent by the executive branch, according to well-established competitive, open-bid procedures. Earmarks are only required to protect unworthy projects from merit-driven competition. And even if there is such a thing as a good earmark, the price invariably is logrolling all the bad ones.

Third, earmarks harm the central tenet of federalism: That local projects should be financed by local communities, and Federal expenditures reserved for the Nation's general welfare.

When a local government proposes an earmark, what is it saying?

It is saying the project is so low on its priority list, it won't spend its own local taxpayers funds; but it is perfectly happy to have taxpayers in other communities foot the bill. The result is a grab bag of dubious projects that rob St. Petersburg to pay St. Paul for projects St. Petersburg doesn't deem worthy enough to spend its own funds on, and that St. Paul pays for but receives no benefit from.

We have sung this old song many times before and it has never ended well.

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