Peter Roskam’s $163 million in Earmarks

When it comes to earmarks, Peter Roskam’s message is “do as I say, not as I do”.

Last fall, Peter Roskam got together with a bunch of fellow Republican extremists who were feeling desperate about their party’s chances in the upcoming 2008 elections after 7 horrible years of mismanagement, malfeasance, and downright criminality by their President, George W. Bush. They decided the only answer was to bring back Ronald Reagan from the dead and so they founded a kind of Ronald Regan resurrection club.

They called their club “Reagan 21” . This is what they had to say about their club:

Republicans have a proud tradition of upholding Ronald Reagan’s principles of liberty and a vision for the 21st Century. That vision is an America that espouses individual freedom, free enterprise, and common-sense values. Americans are crying out for leadership with courage, principle, and integrity. Reagan 21, a new conservative group uniting Republican leaders from both chambers of Congress, was formed to fill this leadership void. Reagan21 presents a positive alternative to the current majority in Congress.

Now I could fill a book about Reagan’s “common-sense values“ (remember Iran-Contra, Reagan’s brutal war in Central America, his opposition to gay rights, his indifference to the poor and to persons with AIDS?) but that is not the point here. The Reagan 21 club proclaimed its emphasis on Integrity and Ethics, presumably because the Jack Abramoff model of the previous few years wasn’t working for them anymore:

Americans deserve to have elected officials who represent them, including Members of Congress, abide by the highest possible standards of professional conduct and personal ethics. No Member of Congress should engage in any activity in which there is or could be a conflict of interest between his or her official duties or activities on behalf of his constituents and any personnel interest of that Member. This duty to avoid conflicts of interest is critical to public confidence in the integrity of our nation’s government. To effectuate this duty, Members must not only aggressively avoid any conflict of interest but also any activity in which there could be even the appearance of a conflict of interest.

One of the ways the Reagan 21 club proposed to promote ethics and integrity in Congress was to end the practice of earmarks. Earmarks are Congress’s way of bypassing the executive branch agencies and allocating funds directly to specific favored pet projects. Earmarks in an appropriation bill are often called “pork”. Citizen’s Against Government Waste, an advocacy group formed to “eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government”, identified 7 criteria for identifying pork:

• Requested by only one chamber of Congress;
• Not specifically authorized;
• Not competitively awarded;
• Not requested by the President;
• Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding;
• Not the subject of congressional hearings; or
• Serves only a local or special interest.

Senators and Congressmen often rail against pork spending but tend to like it because it can be a way of making themselves popular in their home district, effectively buying votes with highly visible projects that would not other wise be funded.

Here’s what the Reagan 21 club has to say about earmarks:

Recognizing this critical duty, House Republicans in 1994 pledged to “re-establish the bonds of trust between the United States Congress and the American people.” Regrettably, we failed to achieve and maintain this goal. Now Congress must reinvigorate its efforts to reestablish those bonds of trust and hold every Member to a zero tolerance standard in which no self-dealing or appearance of impropriety whatsoever will be tolerated.

One of the main culprits of self-dealing is the practice of “earmarking.” The 1981 transportation bill contained only 10 earmarks. President Reagan vetoed a transportation bill in 1987 that contained 121 earmarks, saying, ‘I haven’t seen this much lard since I handed out blue ribbons at the Iowa State Fair.’ In 2005, Congress passed a transportation bill that included an astonishing 6,371 earmarks at a cost of $27.3 billion.

The year before Republicans took the majorities in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, there were 1,400 earmarks. Last year, there were more than 14,000.

So we see that, while most Republican complain about pork and try to blame it on the Democrats, they have been, in actuality, big pork fans. But the Reagan 21 Republicans said that all was going to change. They were going to end earmarks. Yes that’s right, Roskam signed on to a group that declared its intent to pursue a full ban on earmarks, whose members subscribed to a set of core values that included ending all earmarks.

So. How’s Roskam doing in his quest to bring integrity back to Washington by ending the practice of earmarks. Sad to say, not so good. As of today, Roskam’s house website lists a whopping $163, 086, 569 in earmarks for FY ‘08 and FY ‘09. Mr. Roskam really does like his pork, all his pretensions about being a fiscal conservative to the contrary.

I can only speak for myself but this kind of pisses me off. I’m sure there are many worthwhile projects included in Roskam’s long list of earmarks but we have been listening to Roskam lecture the Democrats in Congress on wasteful spending every time they try to do something to help folks who are truly suffering and all the while Roskam is buying votes back home with these projects that bypass the normal appropriations process.

If it makes you mad too, I’d suggest you give Roskam a call and ask him “what’s with all the pork?” Roskam can be reached at his Washington office at (202) 225-4561 or in Bloomingdale at (630) 893-9670.