The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [58]
The much-ballyhooed “earmark-free” CR became so axiomatic that pretty soon prominent Democrats began to issue public statements praising it long before it was even a reality. Senator Robert Byrd and Congressman David Obey, the appropriations chairmen of their respective houses, issued a joint statement on December 11: “We will work to restore an accountable, above-board, transparent process for funding decisions and put an end to the abuses that have harmed the credibility of Congress.” The Washington Post took these statements at face value and on December 12 became the first of many major news outlets to run Congress stories with the phrase “earmark-free” or “earmark freeze” in the headline: “Democrats Freeze Earmarks for Now.” *2
A month or so later, on January 31, 2007, to be exact, the House passed the $463 billion CR by a huge margin, 286–140. Immediately Democrats rushed to take credit for the historically “clean” bill. Leading the charge was Rahm Emanuel, who chirped, “This is an earmark-free bill!” The Washington Post heard Emanuel and jammed his quote straight into a page 4 headline: “House Passes $463 Billion Spending Bill after Deleting Earmarks.”
And yet, all that any of these reporters had to do was read the goddamn text of the CR to see that there were earmarks in there, big ones, not hidden in the slightest. Of course, I wouldn’t have looked myself, had it not been for a friend of mine, a former Senate staffer turned independent budget analyst named Winslow Wheeler. A laconic, silver-haired gentleman with a salt-and-pepper mustache who seems always to have a wry smile on his face, as though living in a constant state of bemused disgust over the pork issue, Wheeler had been fired from the staff of New Mexico senator Pete Domenici in the early part of the decade for writing exposés about Defense Department pork under a pseudonym. Although he’s been out of the Senate for years now, Wheeler is still intimately familiar with the pork/earmark process—in fact, he can even claim to have helped streamline the system.
As an aide to Domenici, he had been in charge of keeping track of the senator’s earmark requests—cataloging them, tracking their progress through the various committees, and, most important, making sure they appeared in the final texts of the bills. “When I first got to Domenici’s office, I was horrified that he had all of these pork requests in the defense bill,” he says now. “And there was no systematic way of keeping track of ’em. It was just a pile of documents. Now, as a staffer I was supposed to keep track of these fucking things. And there were fifty, sixty, eighty of them, who knows.
“So being an organizational wimp I started putting them in a table, keeping track of them. Here’s the item, here’s what the House Armed Services Committee did with it, here’s what the Senate Armed Services Committee did with it, here’s what the HAC [House Appropriations Committee] did with it, here’s what the SAC [Senate Appropriations Committee] did with it, and so on.”
Wheeler later explained to me that the table contained all sorts of information, including budget ID numbers, called PE numbers, and other info. “So in March,” he said, “[Senator Ted] Stevens, the Appropriations chairman, he always wanted senators to send a letter stating what their ‘state interest items’ are—earmarks, in other words—and after the second or third year, I started including my Word Perfect table with Domenici’s letters, to help the Appropriations Committee keep track of what the fuck each item was.
“Well,” Wheeler explained, “Stevens loved that, and after that, he required everybody to include that table. So I guess that’ll be my legacy.”
When the Democrats’ CR came out, I wrote to Wheeler and asked him to ID the earmarks in it for me. He wrote back and said there were several in the CR itself, including one on page 30, line 3, of the 137-page document. It