Cantor’s no-earmark pledge

James Clements
Published: June 15, 2008

My wife will be thrilled when she learns that I’ve sworn off jet-setting to Europe with young blonde Russian tennis stars, but she won’t be surprised. She knows as well as I do that it’s easy to give up something you had no chance of getting anyway.

And so the same principle applies to our own U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Richmond, who recently made the rounds reissuing his pledge to swear off congressional earmarks for our district. Is Cantor’s revelation a sign of true honor among thieves, or is it as far-fetched as my own dreams of the Champs-Elysees?

According to the Office of Management and Budget:
“Earmarks are funds provided by the Congress for projects or programs where the congressional direction (in bill or report language) circumvents the merit-based or competitive allocation process, or specifies the location or recipient, or otherwise curtails the ability of the Executive Branch to properly manage funds. Congress includes earmarks in appropriation bills — the annual spending bills that Congress enacts to allocate discretionary spending — and also in authorization bills.”

In plain language, an earmark is money for someone else’s bridge, research grant or other pet project. When it falls in your own district, perhaps for a much needed railroad crossing arm located at a federal cemetery, it’s called “constituent services.”

While earmarks do fall outside traditional budget lines, and usually end up attaching themselves to critical bills like those for troop funding, in reality, every dollar spent by Congress and the president has a political element to it. (That’s how we end up with Amtrak service through Mississippi and Coast Guard personnel in West Virginia.)
And in a “majority-take-most” system, Cantor’s promise (while possibly not a completely empty one) was a lot easier for him to make this year than it would have been back in the GOP’s glory days, when Cantor was a top toady for GOP heavy Tom Delay. “The Bug Man,” as my former colleague Marshall Wittmann refers to Delay — who was an exterminator before coming to Congress — doled out favors to those on his side while bad-mouthing the irresponsible spending habits of House Democrats at the same time.

For anyone close enough to see the hypocrisy, it was disheartening. Republicans were elected to a majority in 1994 on the back of “Contract With America” promises to clean up Congress; instead, they rewrote the record books when it came to pork spending.

But now the tables have turned in Washington, with Democrats in the leadership and chairing all the committees. And the chances of such a high-ranking Republican like Cantor slipping in a few dollars here or there seems unlikely. And so you have his Potemkin pledge.

According to the Web site of Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, 39 of Cantor’s colleagues, including conservative Democrats Ron Kind (Wisc.), Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Mark Udall (Colo.), and Henry Waxman (Calif.), have all sworn off earmarks. I commend those Democratic members, since their promises might actually mean something.

In Cantor’s case, the pledge appears to be just another trumpet blast in his campaign for re-election. And on the face of it, sounds like a promise that could secure some votes.

But what it also speaks to is a loss of rank and insider status — most obvious in the failure to secure those railroad crossing funds — and a stark reality that as long as Cantor is our representative, Culpeper will have an uphill climb when it comes to making sure our tax dollars are returned to the district.

While I support the goal of cleaning up a broken budget system in Washington, I can’t help but think we’d be better served in the current environment with a change in who we have doing our asking for us in Congress.

James Clements is a Culpeper resident and independent columnist who appears each Monday.
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