Leaders Vow Earmark Rules

27 Jul 2006 // With negotiations over lobby reform stagnant, House Republican leaders announced Wednesday that if talks with the Senate continue to stall they will seek to implement a sweeping rules change that would apply earmark reform measures to all of the chamber’s committees when it returns in September.

“The House-passed lobbying and ethics reform bill includes a series of significant reforms meant to bring greater transparency and accountability to the congressional earmarking practice,” Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and Rules Chairman David Dreier (Calif.) said in a joint statement.

“House Republicans are committed to extending these reforms to all committees and implementing them during the current session of Congress, before any spending or tax bill for the upcoming fiscal year goes to the President’s desk,” the statement read.

Although GOP negotiators in both chambers had hoped to reach agreement on the measure — the standoff has centered on House leaders’ insistence on legislation targeting 527 political committees — and vote on a conference report this week, a deal appears unlikely before House lawmakers recess Friday for the entire month of August. The House still has yet to name conferees on the bill.

With those uncertain prospects in mind, conservative House Republican lawmakers began lobbying the chamber’s leadership late last week to implement the earmark reform measures independent of the overall reform package.

Republican leadership agreed to the demand Wednesday, setting a September deadline for reaching a consensus on the conference agreement.

“If the House and Senate have not produced a final lobbying and ethics reform conference report by the time we return from our August district work period in September,” Republican leaders said in the statement, “the House will move to immediately adopt and implement a comprehensive earmark reform rules change independent of the ongoing lobbying and ethics reform discussions to ensure these new rules apply to all spending and tax measures that will go to the President’s desk this fall.”

While House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.) said he had not seen the leadership agreement Wednesday afternoon — “I’ll have to examine the whole picture,” Lewis said, declining to comment further — several of his committee’s members welcomed the reform proposal.

“I’ve always favored the idea of identifying who makes requests for what,” said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, export financing and related programs.

But several Appropriations members, including Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), asserted that the move won’t mean significant changes, since the panel now applies significant legislative “sunshine” to the spending bills.

“We’re already doing that,” said Knollenberg, who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee on the Transportation Department, Treasury Department, and Housing and Urban Development, the Judiciary and the District of Columbia. “The transparency and the sunshine is already there.”

The Michigan lawmaker pointed to Rep. Jeff Flake’s (R-Ariz.) attempts to defeat numerous earmarks on the House floor earlier this year, noting that the efforts largely failed.

“They were glad to go before the floor,” Knollenberg said of those lawmakers who defended their requests in House debate.

Appropriators also won demands for the inclusion of all legislation under the temporary reform, mirroring a vow Lewis won from Republican leadership in exchange for his support of the lobbying overhaul package.

Both Education and the Workforce Chairman Howard McKeon (R-Calif.) and Science Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) also welcomed the stop-gap reform measure.

“It’s a good thing to do,” McKeon said, while Boehlert, also a senior member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said: “It’s moving the in the right direction.”

Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), who serves on the Ways and Means Committee and widely is viewed as the frontrunner for the panel’s gavel in the 110th Congress, said he had no problem with the earmark changes. “Looks good to me,” he said

Despite that apparent support, it remains unclear how much of an impact the move will have without a similar manuever by Senate lawmakers.

“It’s certainly of less value” without Senate action, said Rep. John Sweeney (R-N.Y.), who sits on the Appropriations panel.

Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.), the former Appropriations chairman who now heads the subcommittee on Defense, took a loftier approach: “The House has to do a lot of things on its own,” he said, then added. “We do tend to be pretty aggressive in the House.”

At least one conservative Republican, Flake, a thorn in his leadership’s side for his advocacy of earmark reform, remained critical, saying the announcement was “better late than never.”

But he cautioned he is reserving final judgment until he sees details of the leaders’ plan and learns whether the new transparency rules will apply to conference reports on spending bills his chamber already has approved.

He noted the House has green-lighted “thousands” of earmarks this year in passing ten of its 11 appropriations bills. The Arizona Republican, by his own estimate, has challenged “a couple dozen” of them, but even within that batch, Flake said he was unsure of all the sponsors.

Flake said if House leaders do not go far enough with their promised reforms, he still plans to challenge earmarks in the Labor-HHS spending bill and is in the process of drafting a privileged resolution to implement his version of a crackdown.