Senate GOP to vote on unilateral earmark reforms

Senate Republicans appear ready to implement some of their long-promised earmark reforms unilaterally. 

According to senior GOP aides, the 49 Senate Republicans will meet Tuesday to vote on a conference-wide rule change and a policy statement on the issue. Both would take effect the first day of the next Congress, two aides said Thursday.

{mosads}This comes after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a longtime appropriator, has repeatedly declined to say whether his conference would take steps to reform the earmark practice if Democrats refuse to go along.

Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell, said his boss would lay out the recommendations at the conference’s upcoming meeting, where the GOP will discuss the best way to proceed. He said some of the reforms could be done by a conference rule change, and others would have to be done through legislation, such as creating methods to kill earmarks that add to the national debt.

Earmarks have become a roiling issue in GOP circles. Critics say the pet projects, which are slipped into appropriations bills, are a waste of taxpayer dollars and a source of corruption. GOP presidential candidate John McCain (Ariz.) is an ardent critic of earmarks, which he said played a major role in Republicans losing control of Congress in 2006.

But veteran lawmakers, especially appropriators, say it is the constitutional right of Congress to determine where federal dollars are spent.

Caught in the middle has been McConnell, who created a five-member task force in January to recommend reforms to the practice. In April, the group recommended that earmarks should be written into the text of authorization, appropriations and tax bills, rather than the report language.

That move, the group said, would give lawmakers an easier chance to challenge pet projects on the floor. It also said senators should include their earmarks on a searchable section of their websites, with a full justification of why the project has been requested. The group also called on the White House to be more transparent in spelling out earmarks it seeks for federal agencies.

It is unclear which proposals would be adopted by the conference unilaterally and which would be rolled into legislation that would need to pass the Senate.

Democrats have scoffed at instituting more earmark reforms, pointing to the transparency requirements they included in the 2007 ethics law.

“I can’t imagine what’s left,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the majority whip, said Thursday. “I don’t think this resonates … I really, honestly believe that the reforms we’ve made have opened up this process far beyond what people imagined.”