STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

Tell us about it

• What would you add to this story? Tell us what we missed.
• Do you have photos from this event? Documents we need to see? Share with us.
• Upload photos & videos
• More ways to get your stuff online and in the paper.

More All

• It’s Christmastime at Palm Cottage
• Great Depression unlike today’s troubling times
• You Review Movie: John Augustine

Share and Enjoy [?]

Congress has a taste for spending money and little appetite for reform.

But there is one thing that might persuade lawmakers to change the habits that led to $220 million being appropriated for a bridge to a sparsely populated island in Alaska and $10 million being directed to an Interstate 75 interchange in Southwest Florida for which no one is willing to take credit.

Ridicule.

Good, old-fashioned mockery seems to be succeeding where earnest pleadings and outrage have failed, at least according to one government watchdog.

Ronald Utt is a researcher and analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. One of his areas of expertise is the federal budget and of late he has been writing about earmarks, the process by which members of Congress insert provisions into spending bills to set aside money for favored projects.

His primer on earmarks and lobbying, available online at www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg1924.cfm, and a New York Times piece on the same topic are eye openers.

Utt describes an industry in which lobbyists solicit business, promising earmarks valued at hundreds of times the fees they charge clients.

“Members of Congress making pork-barrel spending promises to their constituents and delivering on them is one thing, but the buying and selling of earmarks by private speculators as if they were bushels of wheat on the open market is quite another. ... The Constitution reserves the power of appropriating money from the U.S. Treasury exclusively to Congress, how is it that these lobbyists have come by the same privilege, and who has allowed it to happen?” Utt wrote.

The Times describes a federal investigation into the practice of trading earmarks for illicit payments from lobbyists and contractors — an outgrowth of the bribery indictment of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif. The article focuses on a former congressional staff member from California who opened a lobbying firm and is now regarded as the “queen of earmarks.”

Utt isn’t optimistic that ethics reform efforts under way as a result of the Cunningham indictment, the fraud conviction of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the notoriety garnered by the earmark-laden 2005 transportation bill will lead to improvement.

U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who represents part of Collier County in Congress, is big on placing names with earmarks in spending bills. Diaz-Balart is proud to have helped secure $81 million in earmarks to widen I-75 in Collier and Lee counties, but he says he doesn’t know who put an extra $10 million in for an interchange at Coconut Road.

If we knew who sought the money, then we’d have a better idea as to why it’s there, he argues. The House version of ethics reform includes a provision to identify the member who requested a particular earmark. “Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure,” said Diaz-Balart aide Thomas Bean.

But Utt doesn’t see that provision as being particularly helpful. The Coconut Road example notwithstanding, most members are all too happy to take credit for the earmarks. “Go to almost any member’s Web site. They’re all bragging about the things they brought back,” Utt said.

Out of thousands of earmarks in the 2005 transportation bill, a relative few were placed anonymously, Utt said. “A couple dozen hidden earmarks doesn’t even count as the tip of the iceberg.”

Utt does agree with Diaz-Balart on one point. The public may never know who requested the $10 million. “Things are done so informally, literally written on the back of an envelope. The staff knows but they won’t say anything. They want to become lobbyists.”

But even though Utt deems reform legislation “very weak,” he does see lawmakers changing their ways. The reason, he believes, is the amount of derision being heaped upon them in the media and by the population in general.

“(Members of Congress) are coming under quite a bit of scrutiny, also under the ‘laugh test.’¤” Satirists are having a field day with congressional largesse, Utt notes, and that seems to be having some effect on members’ behavior. “You discover you’re losing your sense of dignity.”

He cites a Senate emergency defense appropriation bill that had been stuffed with extraneous spending, including a $700 million “railroad to nowhere” along the Mississippi coast. While the project passed muster in the Senate, it and other earmarks are being stripped out in the House version of the bill. “We’re seeing some fiscal responsibility I don’t think we would have seen a year ago,” Utt said. “I just sent a note around to my colleagues. ‘Is the tide turning?’¤”

For the tide to continue to turn, the scrutiny will have to continue as well, Utt maintains. He senses a desire in Congress to get back to business as usual as soon as possible

So it’s up to us in the media, and up to citizens everywhere, to mock and ridicule Congress every time they blow a few hundred million naming a bridge after themselves or establishing a new wing at the local frankfurter museum?

I think we can handle that.

- - -

E-mail Brent Batten at bebatten@naplesnews.com