As a belated follow-up to Cassandra’s wonderful post on Monday (yeah, the new guy’s sucking up. You got a problem with that?) that touched on earmark reform, I have an idea I want to throw out. This morning as I was doing my usual volunteer work (or I might have been in the bathroom — memory’s a bit hazy) I had an thought about earmark reform. While I like most of the ideas in Sen. Bennet’s plan, there is one that I think sounds better on paper than in real life, but I might have a solution.
The idea is best summarized by John McCain’s campaign promise of, “I will make them famous and you will know their names.” The problem with this is that publicizing earmarks is not a deterrent, it’s free campaign advertising. For the most part, Congressmembers don’t hide their earmarks, they campaign on them. They brag about how much money they bring home (even if they voted against it, right Mr. Castle?). The flaw in the idea of public shaming is that the only people that matter are the incumbent’s constituents. Those are also the people who benefit from the earmarks. It didn’t matter that the rest of the country saw John Murtha as a crook for all his pork-barrelling. The voters in his district saw him as a hero.
My idea is simply this — require a co-sponsor from another district on all earmarks (or maybe just larger ones over a certain threshold). This way, someone whose voters are not directly benefiting from the earmark can be held accountable. Earmarks themselves are not inherently bad. Very many send money to worthy causes and projects. When this is the case, finding a co-sponsor for your amendment should be no problem. If, on the other hand, it’s just pure pork, then ideally other legislators would want to steer clear of it and it would go nowhere.
I don’t claim this is THE SOLUTION, and I’m sure there would still be a fair amount of mutual backscratching, but it might slow down bad earmarks. But since I haven’t seen this idea anywhere else, and I know I’m not that smart, there must be a flaw in here somewhere (besides the obvious that most politicians don’t really want to limit pork). Tell me where I’ve gone wrong.