Lawmakers pushing for earmark reform think Obama boosted their chances

Lawmakers backing a modest earmark reform believe their hopes were
boosted significantly by President Barack Obama on Wednesday night.

In his first State of the Union address, Obama called on Congress “to publish all earmark requests on a single website before there’s a vote so that the American people can see how their money is being spent.”

{mosads}An effort to do so last year faltered, but the strong endorsement has lifted the spirits of the two lawmakers most associated with the idea, Reps. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).

“The president has mentioned it now twice in as many days,” Cassidy said Friday from the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, adding that a number of his colleagues have since approached him asking to sign on to his bill. 

“I know Jackie’s working her side. We’re hoping for the president’s continued leadership, because it’s going to be tremendously helpful.”
 
Mike Larsen, a spokesman for Speier, said she feels like Obama has placed the wind at their backs since Wednesday.
 
Cassidy’s office also pointed to a State of the Union focus group — put together by Republican pollster Frank Luntz – that registered its highest levels of approval when Obama mentioned earmark reform.
 
“The one segment that did the best, among Republicans and Democrats alike, was the segment on earmarks,” Luntz explained on Fox News Wednesday night.  “There’s a message in there [to] Republicans and Democrats alike; the American people are fed up with earmarks.”

Since taking over Congress three years ago, House and Senate Democrats have looked for ways to make the earmark process more transparent. 

Appropriations panels in both chambers last year, for the first time ever, required all members and senators making individual spending requests to post live links on their official web pages when they submitted their requests to the spending committees.
 
The new rules were designed to add an additional level of transparency. Previously, lawmakers were only supposed to disclose earmarks that were approved.
 
But in the House especially, the exercise was fraught with inconsistency, as high-ranking to back-benching lawmakers from both parties applied wildly differing interpretations to a loosely worded rule.
 
While some members chose to display their earmark request prominently on their home pages, dozens of lawmakers buried their earmark links in hard-to-find corners of their web sites. 

Some referred to their requests in less-than-clear terms, while others scattered their links throughout multiple areas of their member web pages.  A full 70 members submitted their spending requests to the committee without posting a link, and it took some in this group weeks to finally do so.
 
Even so, the Appropriations Committee didn’t turn down any earmark requests because of a failure to follow the new rules.

The legislation introduced by Cassidy and Speier (D-Calif.) is intended to fix that problem. It would force the Appropriations Committee to reject at the onset any earmark requests that did not follow the tougher transparency rules.

Last year, their bill failed to get much traction, attracting only six Democratic co-sponsors before the appropriations process fell apart and climate change and healthcare pushed everything else out of the way.
 
But Obama’s call gives them renewed hope.
 
Steve Ellis, vice president of the government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has fought for years against earmarks of any kind, said he was not at all surprised at the focus group results showing support for earmark reform.

“Nobody wants to see their money wasted, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative,” Ellis said.
 
He also said that implementing a more public-friendly earmark request database would be a far easier political lift than Obama’s additional plans to further toughen lobbying restrictions.
 
“This is eminently doable by March,” Ellis said.
 
Cassidy agreed.
 
“I’m not naïve,” he added.  “I know there are some members who want to bury [their earmark requests].  But I think the majority of members who did so didn’t intend to bury the bodies, so to speak.”
 
A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did not return a call seeking comment on Obama’s earmark disclosure proposals.