Editorial: The truth about earmarks

Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007 | 6:46 a.m.

President Bush never said much about earmarks until Congress came under Democratic leadership in January. Since then he's assumed the mantle of earmark reformer.

Congress' passage of the defense spending bill in November and the year-end spending bill this month for other federal departments has given Bush another chance to climb atop his soapbox.

He is making it sound as if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., were exceptionally tolerant of the bills' earmarks.

In fact, the number of earmarks was about average for the past 30 years or so of congressional sessions.

We agree that earmarks - largely unscrutinized appropriations by individual members of Congress for projects back home - are overused and undersupervised. But they are a legislative prerogative and reform should come from Congress, not the White House.

The reality is that the first major reform of earmark spending occurred this year under the Democrats. All earmark sponsors were required to identify themselves. In the House, sponsors additionally had to certify they had no personal conflicts of interest and to specify beneficiaries of the spending.

These measures were a significant start on needed reform and we expect more will follow under Democratic control. But Bush can't resist meddling. As The Washington Post reported last week, he is threatening to test his presidential power by taking it upon himself to wrongly cancel thousands of the earmarks.

In the spending bills passed in November and December, there were about 11,000 earmarks amounting to a little more than $15 billion for projects and programs across the country. We do not consider that an outrageous amount of money, given that Bush is spending $100 billion a year on projects and programs for Iraq.

While on the subject of earmarks, and Bush's intimation that they are the epitome of wasteful Democratic spending, allow us to point out that four out of the five biggest earmark spenders in Congress this year were Republicans.