Commentary - Mark Tapscott: Pork-stuffed Iraq bill shows Bush weakness on earmarks

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - President Bush vows to veto an Iraq emergency supplemental funding bill if it comes to his desk stuffed with pork unrelated to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq properly armed, clothed and fed.

But Bush may have undercut his ability to shape the Iraq bill and indeed all other spending measures with a State of the Union promise. You will recall that Bush condemned earmarks and challenged Congress to work with him to cut them in half.

Earmarks are spending orders anonymous members of Congress slip into bills and committee reports behind the scenes. Being anonymous, there is no way to know if the earmark benefits a donor, political associate, family member or present or former staffer of the sponsoring member.

As Bush said in his State of the Union speech:

“These special interest items are often slipped into bills at the last hour, when not even C-SPAN is watching. In 2005 alone, the number of earmarks grew to over 13,000 and totaled nearly $18 billion.

“Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate. They are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn’t vote them into law. I didn’t sign them into law. Yet, they’re treated as if they have the force of law.”

Curiously, Bush offered no rationale for preserving half of the earmarks he rightly condemned, nor did he even hint at a timetable for eliminating them entirely.

Now comes the Iraq supplemental in which Bush originally asked Congress to appropriate $105 billion for the troops in Iraq and for continued Gulf Coast hurricane relief.

The White House courier delivering the supplemental proposal to Congress had hardly left the Capitol grounds before House Democrats began meeting in secret to pork it up. They stuffed the Iraq supplemental with more than $20 billion worth of pork, some designed to buy votes for the measure but all of it done behind closed doors.

The Iraq supplemental pork isn’t, strictly speaking, earmarks, but it might as well be because nobody knows the identities of the individual members who pushed for each specific item during those closed-door meetings.

Yesterday, a senior administration official vowed in a background briefing for bloggers that Bush would veto the Iraq supplemental if it comes to his desk with too much pork. But that same official wouldn’t say how much pork was too much when asked the threshold amount for not vetoing.

“Obviously, we prefer a clean bill that is not close to the threshold,” the senior administration official said, “and we are hoping the threat of a veto will be sufficient to kick these things out.”

Based on Bush’s State of the Union challenge on earmarks, however, Democrats on the Hill might reasonably think the threshold is somewhere in the neighborhood of half the $20 billion in pork now in the supplemental.

They would also be encouraged in that conclusion by other recent White House actions. Last week, it became clear the Bush administration won’t identify congressmen pushing executive branch departments and agencies for earmarks.

Instead, the Office of Management and Budget released only summary data on earmarks identified thus far, while promising more information on individual earmarks as it becomes available. An OMB spokesman claimed administration officials simply don’t know the identities of most congressmen behind earmarks.

Puzzled by the OMB spokesman’s statement, I queried a number of former Reagan administration colleagues who were intimately involved in congressional relations. They agreed political appointees running executive branch congressional relations shops must know a great deal about who seeks earmarks, particularly among members of key congressional committees whose support is needed for administration proposals.

Seeing all this, it’s hard not to conclude that for all the anti-earmark rhetoric, Bush is as invested in preserving billions in earmarks as are members on both sides of the partisan aisle in Congress.

Earmarks are just the way it’s done these days in the nation’s capital.

Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog.

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