The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [57]
The second thing the Democrats did was pass a rules package containing what it called “earmark reform.” At the beginning of each Congress, the House passes what it calls a “rules package,” and the package is just that, a set of rules that govern how the House is going to operate. In this case, the rules package contained provisions that each bill passed by the House had to either contain a list of the earmarks included within (with the name of the member who requested the earmark listed next to it) or else contain a statement attesting to the absence of earmarks. Moreover, every listed earmark had to include a description of the earmark written by the requesting member, and that same member had to sign a statement attesting to the fact that he or she had not profited personally from said earmark.
If this all sounds confusing, it is. An earmark, to the uninitiated, is the basic currency of congressional corruption. Also called “state items,” earmarks are simply budget items not requested by the administration and jammed into a bill during the budget process by an individual representative. Say Congressman X receives ten grand each election cycle from a cement-mixing company; if he wants to repay that company with a government contract, he ducks into the transportation bill during markups (i.e., while it is being put together in committee) or in conference and gets himself a $10 million highway project stuck into the fine print of the law.
Until now these little budget items were totally unregulated and a source of massive, endemic corruption. Lobbyists and corporate hacks leveraged private money into public works time and time again, as a word to the right committee chair or ranking minority member could get just about anything for anyone, and only the hundred or so people on the Hill who actually know how to read the budget will even know. The notorious “bridge to nowhere”—a $230 million bridge connecting Anchorage and the Knik area of Alaska, which is home to about 250 people—was a classic example of the kind of shit that happens when earmarks go unchecked. That earmark achieved a kind of fame, and unlike most earmarks (which for ages simply appeared anonymously in print, neither noticed nor tied directly to anyone), the Knik bridge deal was almost right away revealed to be the work of Senator Ted Stevens, one of the most powerful legislators in Washington. As the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, a guy like Stevens could, until this year, basically give himself any contract he wanted, jamming bridges and roads and weapons bills into a bill markup at the last minute, like a kid scribbling ice cream and cookie requests onto Mom’s shopping list.
The ethics bill and the rules package were intended to be linked, a matched set. With the ethics bill the Democrats addressed the means lobbyists and other interested parties used to gain access to lawmakers; with the rules package they addressed the means lawmakers used to execute the promised favors.
In theory.
In the weeks leading up to the Democrats’ unveiling of the CR, the word coming out of Washington, at least in the major media, was that the bill would be the “cleanest” budget in years. Even conservatives were praising the new Democratic leadership. Here’s an analysis of the upcoming CR by a pair of Heritage Foundation talking heads back in December of ’06:
With a better sense of the electorate’s anger over congressional corruption and profligate spending, incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) instead plans to extend the money-saving continuing resolution over the entire year and thereby strip all earmarks from this year’s budget. In effect, and as some fiscal conservatives have urged, Pelosi intends to demonstrate that henceforth the budget of the United States