Byron York:
Press coverage of the budget frenzy on Capitol Hill has suggested that pork-barrel earmark spending is still a bipartisan problem, that after months of self-righteous rhetoric about fiscal discipline, Republicans and Democrats remain equal-opportunity earmarkers.
It's not true. A new analysis by a group of federal-spending watchdogs shows a striking imbalance between the parties when it comes to earmark requests. Democrats remain raging spenders, while Republicans have made enormous strides in cleaning up their act. In the Senate, the GOP made only one-third as many earmark requests as Democrats for 2011, and in the House, Republicans have nearly given up earmarking altogether -- while Democrats roll on.
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In the 2011 House budget, the groups found that House Democrats requested 18,189 earmarks, which would cost the taxpayers a total of $51.7 billion, while House Republicans requested just 241 earmarks, for a total of $1 billion.
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The Senate is a different story. But even though some Republicans are still seeking earmarks, Democrats are by far the bigger spenders. The watchdog groups found that Democrats requested 15,133 earmarks for 2011, for a total of $54.9 billion, while Republicans requested 5,352 earmarks, for a total of $22 billion.
If you look at the top 10 Senate earmarkers as measured by the total dollar value of earmarks requested, there are seven Democrats and three Republicans. (The leader of the pack is Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, who requested $4.4 billion in earmarks.) The three Republicans are Sens. Roger Wicker, Sam Brownback and Thad Cochran. One of them, Brownback, is leaving the Senate, while the other two are from Mississippi, which is apparently earmark heaven.
Go down the list a bit more and the party differences are just as clear. Of the top 50 earmarkers in the Senate, 38 are Democrats and 12 are Republicans. And at the bottom of the list, you'll find that the lawmakers who requested few earmarks for relatively small amounts of money are mostly Republicans. And, of course, the senators who have sworn off earmarks entirely (and are trying to convince the rest of the Senate to go along) are Republicans, too.
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We still have some work to do in the Senate but we seem to be breaking the addiction. The combined total for Democrats in the House and the Senate was $106.6 billion. How can they argue that earmarks don't matter and are a small part of the budget. That total appears to be roughly 10 percent. If we eliminate the earmarks and cut discretionary spending by 20 percent back to 2008 levels we could make a good start on reducing the deficit.
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