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The "how-a-bill-becomes-a-law" lesson from last night's bailout bill vote is pretty simple: Pork. As Politico puts it, "with each permutation, the bill has steadily grown in size. Treasury’s initial plan was about three pages long. The House version, which failed, stretched to 110. The Senate substitute runs over 450 pages." It now includes "more than $100 billion in popular tax breaks as well as aid to rural schools important to House Republicans. And to build support among small town community banks, the bill raises the cap on insured deposits from $100,000 to $250,000...[and] tucked away in the tax chapter is a virtual bill onto itself: landmark mental health parity legislation that bars group plans from imposing stricter limits on mental health patients than individuals under the same plans who suffer from physical illnesses demanding surgery and hospitalization."McCain loves to condemn pork, but the fundamental reality of lawmaking is that pork is how bills get passed. Brad Plumer wrote a great article on this for The New Republic back in 2006:
As Alan Murray and Jeffrey Birnbaum reported in Showdown at Gucci Gulch, the definitive account of the 1986 tax reform, "Every time [Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob] Packwood ventured onto the Senate floor, his colleagues stuffed pieces of paper into his jacket pocket, with additional requests for transition rules." It was a feeding frenzy. It was obscene. But it also worked: "The transition rules were a necessary evil; they would help assure passage of the bill." And since the exemptions cost little in the context of the larger bill, it was well worth the price.Less than a decade later, Bill Clinton discovered the virtues of pork while trying to pass his deficit-reduction package in 1993. Since Republicans flatly refused to support the president's budget, Clinton had to strong-arm several holdout Democrats into supporting the bill and its unpalatable tax hikes. Legislative bribery did the trick. Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini stopped opposing the budget after he was promised a cut on Social Security taxes, benefiting seniors (a key constituency in his state). Dianne Feinstein wavered on the bill until she received R&D subsidies for California companies. The budget ended up squeaking through the Senate on Vice President Al Gore's tie-breaking vote and paved the way for balanced budgets late in the decade--a previously unthinkable task which some economists credit with helping to spur the economic boom in the '90s. Pork made it all possible.The point is this: Any big-government program on the progressive wish list will likely prove even more difficult to pass than the 1986 tax reform or 1993 budget. Single-payer health care? Card check for unions? Reductions in carbon emissions? It won't get done without an orgy of earmarks to entice the inevitable skeptics in Congress. That won't be pretty, but if the price of, say, universal insurance is a bit of borderline corruption here and there, it's a tradeoff worth making.Like a lot of McCain's posturing, his war on pork makes for good headlines and bad governance. If he were anywhere near as dogmatic on earmarks as he claims to be, it's impossible to imagine him passing any major legislation. Ever. Or voting for any major legislation. or approving budget bills and spending. Or having a working relationship with Congress. Or getting reelected, as every district in the country finds crucial programs and infrastructure subsidies are being cut. Meanwhile, whenever the topic turns to earmarks, I always suggest that folks go play around the the Sunlight Foundation's interactive earmarks map. Earmarks are rarely obviously wasteful. Rather, they're small appropriations that exist beneath the urgency level that would merit federal consideration. So districts and states elect individual representatives and one of their side jobs is to push through local priorities. Those priorities may be odd, but relatively few are obviously wasteful. Type in my hometown of Irvine, and the nearest earmark is in Long Beach: $450,000 to outfit the children's hospital. Near to that is Mission Viejo, with $400,000 for the Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Unity. And a tick over from that is Huntington Beach, which got $50,000 for an afterschool arts education program for low income youth. It's easy to talk about cutting studies on bear DNA. It's a bit harder to explain why you want to cut children's hospitals and afterschool programs. And it's nearly impossible to then say how you're going to pass bills after you do.
