Carrots and sticks

Earmarks help direct federal funds to local projects, and encourage compromise.

This page has been known to disagree a time or two with our own John Culberson, the veteran Republican who represents the Texas 7th Congressional District, but on one issue we believe he’s absolutely right: The nation needs earmarks.

Earmarks, from the general public’s perspective, are about as popular as earwigs, but their lowly reputation is ill-deserved (same for the lowly earwig, for that matter). They are generally described as line-item requests by lawmakers for federal funds to be directed to specific projects or entities in their individual districts — roads, bridges, museums and the like. They got a bad name a decade or so ago with revelations that some lawmakers had grossly misused them. The $400 million “Bridge to Nowhere” between two remote islands in Alaska may have been the most notorious example. Then-House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, got them outlawed in 2010.

Culberson, who chairs an Appropriations subcommittee, believes they can serve a useful purpose and is co-sponsoring an amendment that would bring them back in limited circumstances. A sizeable number of his House colleagues, Republican and Democrat — including Houston’s two Green congressmen, Gene and Al — support his effort.

Culberson’s amendment would require the earmark request to be made at the committee level and would prohibit using the funds for recreational facilities. The sponsoring lawmaker would have to be identified, the earmark would be fully disclosed to the public and it could only redirect spending, not increase it.

Despite widespread support among his colleagues, Culberson has one formidable foe: House Speaker Paul Ryan, RWis. After a “drain the swamp” election, Republicans “cannot turn right around and bring back earmarks behind closed doors,” the speaker reportedly told his fellow Republicans in a private meeting a few days ago. Fortunately, Ryan didn’t kill the proposal outright but assigned it to a GOP task force that will report back with a revised proposal early next year.

In a frustratingly sclerotic Congress, earmarks would encourage compromise and would help get things done. Since the dawn of the American Republic, as Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic magazine has pointed out, earmarks have “helped glue Congress together by giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and I’ll support yours.”

“Earmarks,” Chris Cilliza of the Washington Post has written, “are the WD-40 that helped the gears of government grind forward. They are the carrot in the carrot-and-stick approach that legislative leaders have long used to cajole weary members to cast a certain vote. They are the cheese on the broccoli.”

Culberson has complained about difficulties he’s had pursuing money for Port of Houston dredging, because doing so would violate the earmark ban. Reps. Gene Green and Al Green have made similar complaints about their inability to direct funding to Houston flood-control efforts because of the earmark ban.

“The lack of the ability for an individual congressman to try to help his own district in specific ways puts us at a great disadvantage,” U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, R-Woodville, told the Dallas Morning News recently. And that’s the point. Our elected representatives are not talking about frivolous boondoggles cunningly conceived to get themselves re-elected. They’re trying to address purely local needs, legitimate needs that they understand better than their congressional colleagues or Washington bureaucrats. Earmarks would help.

Keep pushing, Mr. Culberson. It’s time, once again, to spread the Velveeta over the broccoli.