A Slate writer does. Earmarks and pork barrel deals helped problems get solved. While they became symbols of corruption (both real and imagined) recently, they provided opportunities for congressional leaders to bargain in order to gain support for legislation, McConnell-Biden Plan now being debated in the House.
Earmarks have been banned in the past few years, along the same time that Congress has become dysfunctional and public approval ratings have plummeted. Are these related?
It turns out that a Congress full of highly principled men and women, fired-up by genuine idealism about America’s future, is a place where nothing gets done.
That’s not to say we should pine for a return to bribery and graft, but watching the prolonged fiscal cliff deadlock (and other Obama-era legislative battles) it was hard not to miss a little old-fashioned earmarking and pork.
Consider John Boehner’s embarrassing failure to line up sufficient House Republican support for his own Plan B legislation on the fiscal cliff. Coalition fragmentation has always been a problem for American legislative leaders, but defections normally arise from the center. Legislators holding at-risk seats sometimes feel they can’t do what the leadership wants, and wise leaders don’t expect vulnerable members to vote for everything. DeLay had a term for it: “catch and release”—only making the absolutely bare minimum of members with moderate seats take tough votes, and making sure no member who might be vulnerable in his next election needed to vote for too many leadership initiatives. But a member whose seat isn’t at risk has traditionally needed to vote with the leadership lest leaders retaliate by curtailing pet projects. Take away these pet projects, and a vital tool of legislative discipline goes missing.
You can't have everything.
Anyone who watched Lincoln saw political operates effectively buying votes by offering members who had been voted out of office patronage jobs. This raises an interesting dilemma, does our demand for hyper clean politics make governing difficult?
