The efforts to reform our pay to play political system will remain a “whack the mole” exercise until we finally adopt public financing for election campaigns.

 

 The January 10, 2009, edition of Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS contained an Exposé segment entitled “Mr. Heath Goes Back to Washington.”  The segment returned to the story of two Seattle Times reporters who exposed questionable earmarks awarded by members of Congress to companies in their home districts—often to businesses whose executives, employees or PACs had donated to their campaigns.  The piece starts with the 2006 announcement by the newly elected Democratic Congress that it will run the most ethical government ever and reform of earmark system.

 

The House indeed passed a bill that required rather comprehensive disclosure of earmarks.  The Senate bill, however, initially did not require public disclosure of the ultimate beneficiary of earmarks that first went to a federal agency.  Republican Senator Jim DeMint, a staunch critic of earmarks, proposed an amendment to incorporate the Democratic House bill in the Senate version.  Democratic Majority leader Reid, however, sought to table the amendment.  When some democrats, including the relatively new senator Obama, defected, however, the move was defeated 51 to 46.  Now the senators had to vote up or down on the House version in public view, and it passed 98 to 0.  Hooray, the good guys won!

 

Oops, that was not the end of the story.  The bill still had to go through conference with the House, and guess what.  A little new provision was inserted in the conference.  Paragraph 6A5 provided that Senators would submit all the information concerning earmarks to committee chairmen, but would disclose to the public only their statement that they had no pecuniary interest in the matter.  The recipients of the earmarks would remain Senate secrets.  The loophole swallowed the entire legislation once more.

 

But even that was not the end of the story.  The Seattle Times reporters, for example,  found an $18 million earmark by Democratic congressman John Murtha to Latrobe Specialty Steel, which had made campaign contributions to Murtha.  This earmark had not been disclosed at all.  When the reporters questioned his office, they were informed that this was not an earmark because the bill provided that the award had to be bid competitively.  That, however, is not part of the definition of an earmark, and in fact there was no competition for this program because Latrobe was the only company in the country that could meet the requirements. 

 

Moreover, even if the full House provision had been preserved, the fact remains that it is a paper tiger.  There is no effective enforcement.  There are no consequences when the required disclosures are in fact not made as was found by the Seattle Times reporters.