Boehner Weekly Column: "Spending Reforms a Victory for Tax Payers"
Politicians frequently use military analogies to discuss their policy work, such as “we won a hard-fought battle” to announce victory in a partisan fight. Sometimes, the fights don’t exactly live up to the analogy.
But last week, House Republicans won a critical fight to protect your tax dollars and we forced the new majority to restore Republican earmark reforms that will bring real transparency and accountability to how we spend your money. This fight centered on an ill-conceived plan in which one Member and a handful of House staffers to decide which lawmaker-requested projects would be funded.
However, this plan to hide earmarks in a series of multi-billion dollar slush funds no longer exists. And, Members of Congress will again be able to challenge wasteful spending in appropriations bills on the House floor. As part of the deal completed after extensive negotiations that ended late today, two bills – Homeland Security and Military Quality of Life – that include few or no earmarks – moved forward immediately. All 10 remaining appropriations bills will come to the floor later with their earmarks fully disclosed and subject to challenge by any lawmaker – a key element of the 2006 Republican reforms.
The issue of transparency and accountability in government spending has been at the forefront of congressional action all year. In January the majority approved a conveniently-flawed rules package that made it harder than ever to identify earmarks tucked quietly into spending bills and all but impossible to remove them.
The rules allowed the majority to declare legislation loaded with millions of dollars in earmarks as "earmark free" – a process exploited to secure passage of an illegitimate taxpayer-funded earmark in a bill meant to fund our intelligence activities, over the vehement objections of House Republicans.
As time wore on, the majority abandoned any pretense of fiscal responsibility and purposely wasted time on veto-bait legislation that never had any chance of becoming law. Rather than getting the appropriations process moving, they focused all of their energies on undermining our troops.
Then came a decision to not only make all earmarks secret, but to replace them in Democratic spending bills with multi-billion dollar slush funds – blank spots to be filled in at a later date, all hidden from serious public scrutiny.
Although the full list of project-requests to be included would eventually be printed in the Congressional Record, that would not happen until after the House voted on the funding bills. Lawmakers could write letters about specific projects and express their concerns. That's not accountability; that's a complaints department.
My colleagues and I warned if the appropriations bills came to the floor under this plan, we would fight back. When the first of the spending bills came up earlier this week on Tuesday this warning was ignored. That's when Republicans went on offense.
We relentlessly highlighted Democrats’ broken promises on earmark reform, and assailed the majority for gutting Republican reforms that give each lawmaker the right to challenge individual earmarks on the House floor. Less than two days later, Democrats capitulated.
This was a team effort – plain and simple. Everyone from Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, and the Republican Study Committee to Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI, and his budget committee team; from Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-CA, and his appropriations team to our leadership and everyone in between – we won this by sticking together. Of course, we also had some help from the outside – notably the “Porkbusters” coalition that rallied taxpayers across the country to sign a letter offering to help House Democrats review their secret earmarks.
While this victory is good news for taxpayers, Republicans will continue the fight until the rest of our 2006 reforms are restored. I have introduced a resolution that would fully restore those reforms by allowing earmarks in tax and authorizing bills to be challenged, and Republicans will file a discharge petition to force it to a vote on the floor if necessary.
When I first ran for Congress, I told the people of my district that if they wanted a Member of Congress who would go to Washington to raid the federal Treasury on their behalf, they should not vote for me. I believe we need fewer earmarks in Congress, and I believe we need an earmark process that is open and accountable to the taxpayers whose money Congress spends.
Of course, if Democrats fail to live up to their promises and to the agreement they made with my colleagues and me they know what’s in store: a united Republican Conference that will be back on the House floor highlighting their secret earmarks once again.
