The GOP's Earmark Distraction

This week, the GOP ran from a bipartisan proposal which could actually tackle our budget woes to instead focus on a futile fight over earmarks.

Two deep and abiding  themes collided this week in Washington, D.C.--the public relations desire to deflect from tough fiscal choices and the  policy need to confront them in  the name of fiscal sanity.

Two documents symbolize the battle: the release of the recommendations of the co-chairs of the president's fiscal policy commission (Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson) and the op-ed piece in the Washington Post condemning "appropriations earmarks" written by Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake.

Rep. Flake, responding to a defense of earmarks by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, contends that earmarks have led to less oversight by the Appropriations Committees and have weakened Congress' control over fiscal policy.

The Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan contends that while control over earmarks is not entirely irrelevant to the size of the nation's fiscal problems, 99% of the fiscal problem is over-promising and underfunding of multi-trillion dollar commitments to future generations in the form of Social Security and other pensions, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlements.

It is some kind of sign of the times that almost everyone agrees that earmarks are a big problem, but that the Bowles-Simpson recommendations are, pick your choice: "too tough, too radical, not tough enough but also too radical, extreme to the point of an attack on all we hold dear in America, crazy, or politically impossible."

Thus, once again we observe the collision of form and substance.

The debate makes me think of two events during America's Civil War: the 1861 Battle of Boonville and the July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.

Both cost lives; both had winners and losers.  One was so minor as to have almost drifted out of the minds of all but true Civil War historians; the other remains in the minds of almost all educated Americans.  One made little difference to the outcome of the war itself; the other transformed American history in a manner so profound that it echoes in many political discussions l47 years later.

Ask Lee or Meade, or Lincoln or Jefferson, which one really counted.  Ask them if they would have traded a different outcome at Boonville for a different outcome at Gettysburg.

The scuffle over earmarks seems like a Battle of Boonville in this great war for fiscal sanity; the Bowles-Simpson plan begins the fiscal Battle of Gettysburg.

Next week, the Bipartisan Policy Center in D.C. will release its year-long report and recommendations on future fiscal policy.  If anything, it may well prove even more radioactive to politicians than that of Bowles and Simpson, because it is likely to be even more transformative to America's future.

I have a way to satisfy both sides: if Rep. Flake and others who worry so much about the pernicious impact of earmarks will support the Bi-Partisan Policy Center's fiscal blueprint, or that of Bowles-Simpson, then every member of Congress will support elimination of earmarks.

I know from my 30 plus years of work on federal budget policy what would happen to that proposal.

Concern about earmarks is merely a way to kick the fiscal can down the road, while telling constituents that "we have done something about spending."  No one would have to be told that "we did something" if Congress adopted a comprehensive plan like that of Bowles-Simpson or the Bi-Partisan Policy Center.

If Lee or Meade had worried about Boonville, instead of concentrating on Gettysburg, history would treat them as incompetent at best, murderously stupid at worst.