Comment & Debate
Melissa Harris-Lacewell. “In Defense of Earmarks”. The Nation. March 10, 2009 – But there is nothing inherently evil or bad about such a system. In fact, it is nearly impossible to imagine any other way of crafting a federal budget. Of course we all pay into the pot. Of course some projects benefit some localities and other projects benefit other localities. This is part of the genius of our Founding Fathers. They created a system with multiple layers of accountability. Members of the House of Representatives are elected from local districts and they are supposed to worry about being responsive to local interests. They are reelected every 2 years to ensure maximum accountability to these local interests. It is their job to make sure that many of the local spending projects end up in their district. If your representative is not doing this then you should fire her! Seriously. Please make sure that federal government money is allocated to your community and if it isn’t please run against your member of Congress in 2010.
Now Senators are elected from states and are supposed have somewhat broader interests. They have a longer electoral clock (6 years) so that they can think more long term and because they are accountable to an entire state they are supposed to take a broader view. Good. Senators are not as accountable to localized interests. Each of us is BOTH a citizen of a congressional district and of a state. It is right and proper to have both our local interests and state interests represented in political bargaining. Part of the reason every state has 2 senators is so we can have overlapping understandings of what it means to represent a state.
Then there is the president who has a view of the entire nation and so is meant to guard broad national interests alongside the local concerns. At its best it is a great system where the multiple overlapping constituencies allow all of our interests to have some chance of representation.
The system is not made better by denying the reality of local interests just to claim to be doing everything in the national interest. We are a country of states, we are states of cities, we are cities of neighborhoods. Each of us, each of our communities, makes up the big picture.
Local spending projects (earmarks) are just part of that process. The only way to govern without local spending proects is for the federal government to simply give all the money to the states and let the states decide how to spend the cash. Trust me when I tell you that this is not a good idea. If you have any doubt about what happens when states are allowed to set autonomous policy without federal intervention then I suggest you spend some time reading about slavery and the Civil War.
“In Defense of Earmarks”. Lew Rockwell Blog. August 27, 2008 – All the usual suspects are criticizing earmarks again. Being anti-earmark, like McCain and the Beltway types, is a way to seem anti-spending while actually strengthening executive power. Earmarks do not increase spending; they are congressional allotments of proposed spending. If money is not directed by Congressman X to the public library in Topeka, it goes to the presidency, where the federal agencies spend it. Earmarks are, in effect, a legislative blow at executive supremacy. A very minor one, it is true, but you can tell by the neocon yelps, not to mention the opposition of the Club for Growth, that earmarks are comparatively a good thing. So it is no contradiction for Ron Paul to request earmarks that his constituents want. He votes against the spending, of course, but if the earmark goes through, that’s better than Bush and Cheney getting the dough for their nefarious scheme.