TOPEKA, Kansas — Eleven years ago, in a navy-and-wood-paneled Topeka TV studio, then U.S. Reps. Jerry Moran and Todd Tiahrt argued ahead of the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate.
Looking directly into the camera, Moran told viewers he backed a moratorium on earmarks, but “Congressman Tiahrt led the effort to keep the earmarks process in place.”
Tiahrt framed it differently.
“Well, when you listen to Congressman Moran, you’d think that I’m the only one in Washington or from Kansas that does earmarks,” Tiahrt said.
But, he said, everyone was using them.
“In fact, just last year,” Tiahrt said, “Moran supported and requested more than $250 million dollars in earmarks.”
Earmarks give Congress a tool to tie money from a spending bill to a specific project without going through all of the hoops of a normal funding request.
They’d become a favorite target for Republicans, glaring examples of the soft corruption of incumbents that wasted money on things like a bridge to nowwhere. And when the budget hawks of the Tea Party swept into the U.S. House, earmarks got swept away.
Tiahrt’s seat on the powerful appropriations committee and his desire to reform earmarks, rather than ditch them entirely, put a target on his back. He lost to Moran, who’s since become a senator.
This year, Democrats in Congress brought earmarks back, and they’ve invited Republicans to join in snagging money for special projects in their districts. Some Republicans are cashing in. But earmarks pose a double-edged sword for members of a party that has long stood for less spending and lower taxes. If they don’t play the earmark game, they leave money in Washington that could’ve come back to their districts — and won them votes.
IN 2010, before Jerry Moran became a senator, gone were the days of touting the $142, 500 dollars he had secured to help pay for the McPherson Opera House, or the earmark requests he’d made to help a community college build a biotech center.
Shortly after the 2010 elections, the earmarks that helped build coalitions, pass big spending bills, and generally greased the wheels of Capitol Hill went away when House Speaker John Boehner banned them.
Giving up earmarks also meant surrendering up a way to control some of the Republican Party’s most fiscally conservative firebrands. There weren’t as many incentives like campaign donations or spending money for special projects to bring people to middle ground.
“What else do you have? Well, you could really go nuclear, if someone is a real thorn in your side, and remove them from a committee,” said Laura Blessing, who studied earmarks as a senior fellow at the Georgetown Government Affairs Institute. “It’s just too strong of a tool. That’s a sledgehammer.”
Then-U.S.Rep. Tim Huelskamp felt that hammer’s blow. He’d had a stormy relationship with Boehner. The speaker booted the congressman from western Kansas, and leader of the House Freedom Caucus, off the House Agriculture Committee. And for the first time in 150 years, Kansas no longer had a player sitting at the table when farm policy got hashed out.
