Over the weekend I was forwarded an e-mail from a friend who lobbies for an organization that’s received federal earmarks in the past. The e-mail was sent to my friend by two staffers for U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who write in the message that the Senator won’t be making any earmark requests for the upcoming fiscal year. Interestingly, I can’t find any public announcement of this policy on the Senator’s website or on any blogs or MSM sites. Anyway, here’s the text of the e-mail:
From: Broom, Daniel (Bayh)
To: Hayes, Patrick (Bayh)
Sent: Wed Mar 11 17:37:45 2009
Subject: Congressionally Directed Spending RequestsYesterday, the Senate passed the remaining Fiscal Year 2009 spending bills. For those who read Senator Bayh’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it will come as no surprise that the Senator opposed this legislation because he feels Washington has to do more to tighten its fiscal belt during the recession. The Senator believes that our top priority must be economic recovery and that every dollar spent should bolster that effort. Regrettably, too often our broken budget process produces spending that does little for the economy, and instead only pushes us deeper and deeper into debt.
For this reason, Senator Bayh has decided to forgo appropriation earmark requests for this year, which means our office will not be accepting requests for the FY10 cycle. We are hopeful that the billions of new dollars directed to Indiana from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be sufficient to help get the Indiana economy back on track and thousands of Hoosiers back to work. Our office stands ready to offer the Senator’s support for worthy initiatives competing for economic stimulus funding as part of the Act’s provisions. Feel free to contact me should you have questions.
Thank you,
Pat
Other than the fact that Bayh apparently hasn’t publicly announced this policy yet, the thing I find interesting here is that despite making some good progress on restoring their fiscal street cred over the past couple of months, many Republicans continue to get outflanked on the issue by some Democrats – due entirely to some Republicans’ unexplainable addiction to pork-barrel spending.
If Bayh’s one-year (or possibly longer – TBD) self-imposed earmark moratorium counts on the Club for Growth’s list of Senators who refuse to wallow in the pork barrel, there are now four Republicans (Coburn, DeMint, McCain and Burr,) but three Democrats (Bayh, McCaskill, and Feingold) who have sworn off pork.
All of which reminds me of Patrick Ruffini’s post at The Next Right last week, in which the GOP strategist called for Republicans to embrace a total earmark ban:
“If we are going to spend $819 billion on an economic stimulus, and a $410 billion omnibus on top of it, the least Congress could do to signal that they are giving up some part of the gravy train is to suspend earmarked spending for the duration of the budget crisis. This is a political winner for Republicans… In a minority situation such as the one we are in, it helps to pick fights we can win in the court of public opinion.”
Of course, I think Ruffini is exactly right – probably because I’ve been arguing the same points for years.
In any case, as Republicans begin to make some real headway in repairing their party’s damaged brand with cynical taxpayers, their progress is inevitably going to be limited by the reality check that roughly 40% of the earmarks they complain about in x or y spending bill are secured – and then bragged about – by their own Members. And if there’s one thing voters hate more than runaway spending, it’s runaway hypocrisy.
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As a resident of Indiana under Mr. Bayh since his days as governor, this is a very wide departature for him that I do not believe. It may just be because he is due for re-election in 2010.
Comment by Wayne Brewer March 25, 2009 @ 2:31 pm