The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [59]
“That’s what an earmark looks like?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Wheeler. “Well, that’s one variety.” He went on to explain that the cancer research earmarks were a nearly twenty-year tradition in the Congress, the by-products of an ongoing War of the Roses–style gender piss-fest between various members of Congress.
“It all started in the nineteen-eighties, when Pat Schroeder started sticking in ‘women’s health services’ earmarks for breast cancer research,” Wheeler said. “Then in the nineties, the boys got jealous and stuck in earmarks for prostate cancer. Then the girls went back and stuck in ovarian cancer. I’ll bet you another lunch that we’ll get testicular cancer next year, earmark reform or not.”
All in all, there were about a half-billion dollars in earmarks in the “earmark-free” continuing resolution, which incidentally was sort of a canard to begin with. A CR is not a real budget; it is merely a mathematical formula that allows Congress to pay for government programs based on funding levels from, among other things, the previous year’s budget. There are almost never earmarks in a CR itself; the earmarks are usually in the actual budget the CR refers to. So when the Democrats promised an “earmark-free CR,” that was already funny—continuing resolutions, by nature, are almost always earmark-free anyway.
And yet in this case, the Democrats hit it both ways. They actually did put a half-billion dollars’ worth of earmarks in this, their first CR, and then, in the defense budget anyway, they explicitly left in the earmarks from the previous year’s budget. That is what the following passage from the CR means, when translated into human language:
Amounts made available in this section are subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2007…
Although the “earmarks” were said to have been removed from the budget, in fact the sums of money for the earmarks were left in the budget and distributed to the same agencies they had always been intended for. The money was still there, waiting to be spent—it just wasn’t called an earmark anymore.
“It’s an insult to Swiss cheese,” said Wheeler. “I’ll bet you that as we speak, staffers are calling agencies and saying, ‘We want to make sure that you know that all the money from last year is still there.’”
And indeed, less than a week or so after the CR passed, word leaked out that a Republican staffer from the Senate Appropriations Committee had been circulating an e-mail request for earmarks for the upcoming Labor–Health and Human Services (colloquially known as the “Labor H”) appropriations bill. The e-mail read:
The Labor-HHS deadline for all requests will be April 13, 2007.
This deadline includes any programmatic funding, project funding, bill or report language requests that your Senators would like to submit for the FY2008 LHHS bill.
Please submit all requests by e-mail and deliver a hard copy to SD-156.
The “project funding, bill or report language requests” called for in this letter—that’s Congress-ese for earmarks. The letter was irrefutable evidence that everything in Congress was back on the usual schedule. Appropriations season’s coming up, send us your Christmas list. Incidentally, Santa moved; he’s in the Democratic offices now.
SOME TIME LATER in the spring, the Democrats found themselves in a much-publicized bind. Charged with the responsibility of drawing up a budget for the unwanted Bush war, the Democrats—who had been elected on a mandate to end the conflict—were under heavy pressure to tie that funding to a timeline for withdrawal. And they initially did so, writing up an “Iraq supplemental” budget that made an exit timeline a precondition for funds disbursement.
That seemed like solid confrontational politics, except that the word soon leaked out that (a) President Bush planned on vetoing the supplemental and (b) the Democrats were almost certain to rework the budget the next time around, taking the timeline out. The whole withdrawal-timeline thing in this first pass at the war