WASHINGTON – Congress has decided that an election year with recession written all over it is not the time to be giving up those job-producing “pork” projects bemoaned by both parties' presidential candidates.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has quietly shelved the idea of a one-year moratorium on so-called earmarks, the $18 billion or so in pet projects that lawmakers sent to their home states this year. Senators in both parties have voted to kill the idea.
Pelosi earlier had signaled her support for the idea of including no legislative earmarks in next year's budget. She pulled back in the face of resistance by Democratic allies and after the Senate opposed the plan.
The response to the Senate vote from lawmakers: They sent in so many last-minute earmark requests that a House Appropriations Committee Web site seized up and the deadline for requesting projects had to be extended.
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, and the GOP leader in the House, John Boehner of Ohio, this year tried to persuade party colleagues to break their addiction to pet projects for at least a year.
More than three-quarters of House Republicans signed on to the plan.
Even so, Republicans flooded the Appropriations Committee with earmark requests, with many backers of a moratorium taking part.
“My patience is running out on earmarks, I'll tell you that,” Pelosi said March 6. “I don't intend to spend a whole lot of time talking about them. We'll either have them or we won't, but we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about it.”
McCain's Democratic rivals, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, then joined the call for a one-year ban.
Several key Senate Republicans opposed the ban, as did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and all but a handful of Democrats.
Having preserved their right to earmark, lawmakers nonetheless shouldn't count on delivering too much before Election Day. That's because few if any of the 12 spending bills that carry earmarks are likely to be sent to President Bush before then, much less be signed by him.
Bush has told Congress to cut the number and cost of earmarks in half from current levels or he will veto spending bills. He has told Democrats to accept a freeze on domestic programs funded by Congress each year.
