Coburn and DeMint Stand Firm on Earmarks

If the two senators pull this little coup off, voters can party hearty on December 31. John Fund explains at today’s OpinionJournal.com:

It’s been years since federal agencies have screamed this loudly about fiscal discipline being imposed on them. GOP Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina have decided to take a stand against overspending by objecting to the nearly 10,000 earmarks, or member-sponsored pork projects, larded throughout the spending bills Congress is currently considering.

Their obstinacy has convinced the leadership of the departing Republican Congress that they probably won’t be able to pass spending bills in next month’s short lame-duck session. Instead, they are likely to pass a stopgap “continuing resolution,” which will continue funding all programs at last year’s level until the new Democratic Congress passes its own versions of the funding bills.

Mr. Coburn says the decision not to pass earmark-stuffed catchall spending bills could save taxpayers a cool $17 billion. All 10,000 earmarks in the pending bills will expire if they aren’t passed by the end of the year.

….. Overall federal spending has gone up by 49% since 2001, but you wouldn’t know it from the anguished cries of those who regard ever-higher spending as some sort of birthright. A Congress Daily headline reads, “Agencies Say Long-Term CR Would Devastate Programs.” The New York Times warns of “cuts in school breakfasts and shelter for the poor.” Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who became a symbol of earmark excess in 2005 when he championed the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” laments that several “very important” projects in his state stalled. “Some of it is money to help West Coast villages continue to recover from that bad storm they had in 2005 and earlier this year,” he told reporters.

Nonsense, say Messrs. Coburn and DeMint. “Any agency that can’t figure out how to function under a one-year CR is incompetent,” a Coburn spokesman tells Congress Daily. “If appropriators took this seriously they wouldn’t be wasting time earmarking and putting stoplights in their districts. The hypocrisy is astounding.”

Exactly. If all this “suffering” is going to occur with another Continuing Resolution, cut out some other wasteful spending to make room for spending that will address true emergencies.

Forcing the new Congress to bring up the 10,000 earmarks all over again will have the benefit of immediately showing whether or not it is at all serious about what it supposedly campaigned on. The pressure on them to pleasantly surprise fiscal conservatives will hopefully be significant.

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UPDATE: Porkopolis has links to a rundown of the pork compiled by the Heritage Foundation and a related C-Span video in RealPlayer format.