McCain to call GOP porker's bluff

Robert Novak:

The congressional Republican establishment, with its charade of pretending to crack down on budget earmarks while in fact preserving its addiction to pork, faces embarrassment this week when the Democratic-designed budget is brought to the Senate floor. The GOP's presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, is an uncompromising pork buster with no use for the evasions by Republican addicts on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jim DeMint, a first-term reform Republican from South Carolina, is to propose a one-year, no-loopholes moratorium on earmarks as a budget amendment. McCain has announced his support for the amendment and intends to co-sponsor it. DeMint wants to coordinate McCain's visits to the Senate floor from the campaign trail so the candidate can be there to speak and vote for the moratorium.

The irony could hardly be greater. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, an ardent earmarker, is smart enough politically to realize how unpopular the practice is with the Republican base. Consequently, McConnell combines anti-earmark rhetoric with evasive tactics designed to save pork. But McCain, surely not the presidential candidate McConnell wanted, is pledging that as president he will veto any bill containing earmarks. McConnell, meanwhile, is running for reelection in Kentucky by bragging about the pork he has brought the state.

McConnell has appointed a "task force" of five Republican senators to study earmarks, headed by the universally respected Richard Lugar of Indiana. But Lugar has never shown much interest in the subject. The dominant member is Thad Cochran of Mississippi, ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee and the Senate's reigning king of pork. Cochran, who not long ago suggested McCain is unfit to be president, has secured $774 million in earmarks this year. Add the earmarks of three other members -- Lugar, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and Mike Crapo of Idaho -- and the task force itself accounts for more than $1.1 billion in pork.

The fifth member is Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, DeMint's partner in pork-fighting and a McCain supporter. How will Cochran and Coburn agree on earmarks? The answer is that they will not. "Everyone knows," a Senate reformer told me, "Cochran will never allow his right to earmark to be diminished." Since McConnell insists on "consensus" without a majority or minority report, all that will come out of the task force is a call for "transparency."

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The case for earmarks is vague at best, but it is apparently persuasive to most members of Congress. Earmarks are considered "accomplishments" by many instead of subtle form of corruption or at best a lack of budget discipline.

They are unpopular with most Republican voters but, unfortunately, not with most Republican politicians. The anti porkers are a minority of a minority in both the Senate and the House and the position of the majority of the GOP politicians is likely to make the Republicans an even smaller minority in the future.

The Democrats in their practice of the politics of fraud ran against earmarks in 2006 and won, then promptly broke their promise. It was probably a bigger difference maker than the war was in the 2006 election, but many Republicans in Congress would rather be in the minority than give us their earmarks.