Anti-earmarks sentiment grows among Republicans

By Karoun Demirjian

Monday, Nov. 15, 2010 | 1:43 p.m.

A fast flip from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has effectively sealed the deal on an earmarks policy, as far as the GOP goes.

In his opening floor speech this afternoon, McConnell pledged to press for a moratorium on earmarks — an issue Tom Coburn announced today he would try to force a vote on in the coming days, as Congress takes up food safety legislation, its first potentially earmarkable bill.

A growing body of Senate Republicans — beginning with self-dubbed Tea Party piper Jim DeMint, but including more traditional conservatives like John Cornyn and John Thune and moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe — have been touting a no-earmarks policy for Congress as a way to decrease spending in the new Congress.

It’s a call that had already been heard by top GOP brass in the House; Speaker-elect John Boehner has said he would impose a no-earmarks policy for bills emerging from the lower chamber next year following the midterm elections.

Earmarks have come to be a dirty word in Congress, as the category of pet spending projects that has included such universally derided projects as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere.” But McConnell had resisted party pressure at first to dismiss them outright, expressing confidence that they were a legitimate lawmaking occupation, and doubts that cutting earmarks would actually save money in the end.

In Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was re-elected to his Senate seat largely on the back of his proven ability to bring back federal dollars — a.k.a. earmarks — to the state for local projects; over $100 million for military-related projects alone, according to his spokesman. Sen. John Ensign, too, has been active earmarking dollars to come back to Nevada.

Not all Republicans are on board. Sen. James Inhofe — Coburn’s senior partner from Oklahoma — has suggested that those pushing for a total earmark ban are “brainwashed.”

But allies like Inhofe won’t help Reid preserve the earmark option when his own president appears to have adopted the Republicans’ way of thinking.

“Congress should be ready to put some skin in the game,” Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio address, in which he touted his own history with earmark reforms and calling the practice of securing earmarks “a bad Washington habit” that if undone, could “take a step toward restoring public trust.”