By Jeremy Lott

John Boehner has a history of suing people, so I’ll choose my words carefully and hold those intercepted phone conversations for later. The new majority leader seized the reins of House leadership last Thursday. Most vote counters predicted that whip Roy Blunt would take it on the first ballot, but the third man in the running, John Shadegg of Arizona, kept Blunt from achieving an absolute majority. When Shadegg threw his support to Boehner, our lawsuit-happy friend took control of the runaway stagecoach that is the Republican majority.

It made a certain black comic sense. Boehner’s political career is a textbook example of what Michael Kelly used to call the difference between right and righteous. Boehner knows how to create the appearance of virtue, and his party could use a facelift for this year’s elections.

Still, it’s a mark of how desperate Republicans are that they’re willing to take a chance on him. Boehner, a very successful businessman (in plastics and packaging) who’d dabbled in Ohio politics, has had a political career propelled by whimsy and boredom. When a sex scandal rocked Representative Donald Lukens, Boehner destroyed him in the 1990 Republican primary, and has dabbled in playing a Congressman ever since.

He’s played the Main Street Republican, the idealistic small government man, the moderate just-enough-government neo-Clintonite, the tobacco industry stooge, the outraged Zippergate moralist, the conservative Robespierre wannabe and the modern K Street Republican. And that only brings us to 1999.

Boehner’s genius in the House leadership race was to cast “reform” in terms of good PR. His recent Wall Street Journal op-ed used the word “perception” (as in, the Republicans have a perception problem) twice in the course of calling for a “huge change in the congressional culture” that was to consist, mostly, of electing him as majority leader. Also, Congress needed to “reform the laws governing so-called 527 organizations,” the only remaining campaign vehicle that currently favors Democrats.

The Ohio congressman knew that members of the Republican caucus want some way to quiet the ethical storms without ceding the pre-squall perks of public office. His solution: Elect a fresh face, axe 527s, pass a few nominal restrictions on lobbyists and find a way to tackle the dreaded earmark problem.

Earmarks, or funding attached to a specific local project at a member’s request, have shot up like crabgrass over the last several years, and have come to symbolize gaudy Republican excess. Plans to restrain earmark spending fall under three broad categories:



1. Attach names to every earmark. This is called the transparency solution, but it’s really the throw-them-in-the-briar-patch solution. Members love to be able to brag about how they’re working hard to bring some of that money back to their district. Tagging earmarks would only give them a receipt to show voters.

2. Force a vote on every single project. Given the rising number of earmarks (just shy of 14,000 last year, up from 2,100 in 1998), the intent would be to cut down on the size of the problem. More likely, it would increase the amount of money allocated in each.

3. Ban earmarks. Great idea. Except, the normal legislative process would fall apart. Over the last several years, support of members for various legislative packages has been secured by the easy ability to insert projects at the last minute into unrelated bills. In order to function, Congress would either reinstate earmarks under different names or switch to general grants by state.



Pork reform is like most other reform efforts: self-interested and intended to leave a holier-than-thou impression. Imagine the pork fairy could wave his magic wand and eliminate every single earmark or similar project funded by the federal government. According to Citizens Against Government Waste, pork projects last year came to $27.3 billion, or about one per cent of the total federal budget. Big fucking deal.

The fight over earmarks is a fight over appearances. “Pork” is something that everybody hates in the abstract and loves when they benefit from it. This gives members room to rail against projects that are going to those free spenders in other districts while bragging about all the money that they’ve brought home for elevated dirt bike trails and Manatee preservation.

The whole debate skirts the one stubborn truth of our futile fiscal condition. Untouchable entitlements like Social Security and Medicare will eventually either bankrupt the nation or force old people to eat cat food and take two aspirin for that heart failure.

Boehner is pushing for earmark reform because cutting the money spent on them by half—hell, one quarter—would hit the perfect trifecta: Republicans would shore up their fiscally conservative base, help take the bite off of the lobbying scandals and inflict a lot of pain on the Democrats.

With their majority, the GOP can craft larger schemes to benefit Red State constituents, like, say, more subsidies for ethanol production. And they can make sure that any earmark cuts fall hardest on Democratic constituents, prompting shrieks of entitled rage just in time for the Republicans’ toughest election in a long, long time.

Jeremy Lott is the author of In Defense of Hypocrisy (forthcoming from Nelson Current).