By Ezra Klein I'm writing this from beautiful LAX airport, which I'm sure has benefited from a number of earmarks in its time. There's no way, for instance, that there can possibly be this many Hudson News kiosks without federal subsidies playing a role. (Actually, snark aside, that's sort of true: The inability to bring toothpaste or bottled water through security has been a windfall for airport vendors.) So it seems only fitting to highlight Obama's remarks on earmark reform:
Earmarks must have a legitimate and worthy public purpose. Earmarks that members do seek must be aired on those members' websites in advance, so the public and the press can examine them and judge their merits for themselves. Each earmark must be open to scrutiny at public hearings, where members will have to justify their expense to the taxpayer.Next, any earmark for a for-profit private company should be subject to the same competitive bidding requirements as other federal contracts. The awarding of earmarks to private companies is the single most corrupting element of this practice, as witnessed by some of the indictments and convictions that we've already seen. Private companies differ from the public entities that Americans rely on every day –- schools, and police stations, and fire departments.When somebody is allocating money to those public entities, there's some confidence that there's going to be a public purpose. When they are given to private entities, you've got potential problems. You know, when you give it to public companies -- public entities like fire departments, and if they are seeking taxpayer dollars, then I think all of us can feel some comfort that the state or municipality that's benefitting is doing so because it's going to trickle down and help the people in that community. When they're private entities, then I believe they have to be evaluated with a higher level of scrutiny.
The fact that these reforms won't "work" speaks to the essentially trivial nature of the earmark debate. What Obama has proposed here is a process for better earmarks. In particular, exposing private sector subsidies to the competitive bidding process is a no-brainer. But the earmark discussion is about creating less embarrassing earmarks. John McCain doesn't twitter about boondoggle subsidies to local contractors. He twitters about trolleys for Puerto Rico (presumably because "trolley" is a funny word) and sidewalk construction in Virginia and the "totally teen zone" in Georgia. He's making fun of parochialism. But you can't legislate the parochialism out of a guy who has to get Montanans, but not Virginians, to vote for his reelection. And Obama isn't trying. Rather, he's taking the force of the conservative attack on earmarks and using it to push a fundamentally progressive reform of the system. If successful, the reforms won't end the issue's salience nor choke off McCain's twitters, but they will give the Obama administration a substantive win and conservatives a quiet loss, as the new rules will subtly bias the earmark system towards public projects rather than private spending. His full remarks follow the fold.
