March 7, 2006
In Defense of Pork
By Jay
Cost
Many conservatives
thought last month’s selection of John Boehner as House
Majority Leader was a sign that the Republican caucus is prepared
to change its spending habits. Though most in the conservative
crowd preferred John Shadegg, Boehner’s promise to hold
the line on “earmarks” satisfied many conservatives
that the vote was a step in the right direction. However, restraining
discretionary spending has been, since the election of Reagan,
a “one step forward, two steps back” sort of progress
for the GOP. Despite their allegiance to the principle of limited
government, Republicans members have never changed how Congress
spends money.
Why have
congressional Republicans – despite their ostensible desire
to reduce the size of the discretionary budget as well as their
ten-year control of the House – failed so miserably? If
you consider the string of Republican legislative accomplishments
that date back to the Clinton Administration, from tax cuts to
welfare reform, this failure is quite a puzzle. Most in the pundit
class have found somebody or something to blame for Republican
ineptitude, but few identify the true reasons. As I will argue
presently, the issue is not simply a weakness of Republican will.
Nor, for that matter, is it due to being co-opted by the “Washington
establishment”. It is not Bush’s fault. It is not
DeLay’s fault. It is not Reagan’s fault. Republicans
in Congress continue to waste money for much deeper reasons –
that get to the very heart of the American political system.
The first
mistake that conservatives make when they criticize the congressional
GOP is the assumption that congressional Republicans are Republican
in the same way that they are. It is not true. A half-century
ago, the great Harvard political scientist V.O. Key argued that
a political party must be understood as the conglomeration of
three distinct parts – the party organization, the party-in-government,
and the party-in-the-electorate. All three parts have different,
sometimes competing, interests. Today’s party-in-the-electorate
– the base, the party intellectuals, the donors –
want above all to have the party platform enacted. The Republican
party-in-government – President Bush as well as the Republican
congressional caucus – also wish that. However, they desire
something more than the implementation of Republicanism
– and that is their reelection. Long gone are the days of
the citizen legislature that the Framers envisioned for the Congress.
Congress is now composed of professional legislators – who,
once they have secured office, intend to keep it indefinitely.
This is their primary goal. It is a goal that the party-in-the-electorate
does not share. Voters in the Republican electorate have no personal
offices that they need to preserve.
The preeminence
of reelection in the mind of the legislator is something that
most pundits accept, but fail to appreciate. To understand members
of Congress, the priority of reelection is an absolute, positive,
unequivocal first principle. This is not to say that
members of Congress do not care about good policy; it is only
to say that good policy comes second to reelection. Members pursue
good policy only when they think that it will not diminish their
chances in the next election. So, when it comes to “Republican
congressmen”, you cannot separate the first word from the
second. They are Republicans, but they are not Republicans like
the party faithful. They have different goals: reelection first,
Republicanism second.
This is not
intended to be a moral critique of members of Congress. In their
defense, we should say that reelection is the necessary condition
for any policy goal they might have. No reelection, no policy
agenda. Thus, this is not a criticism of Democrats who “sell
out” their liberal agenda by cozying up to big business
or Republicans who “sell out” their conservative agenda
by wasting discretionary funds. They are doing what they have
to do to secure reelection, which is the first step to achieving
any of their ideological goals.
If reelection
is the principal goal, what strategies must a member adopt to
achieve it? Recall our previous examination of how congressional
elections actually work. While party turnover in Congress tends
to move according to national trends, members of Congress win
or lose votes depending upon what their constituents think of
them. The average voter, in the course of making his vote choice,
does not ponder the extent to which the selection of a Republican
will extend Republicanism; rather, he evaluates what he thinks
of the member personally and what he has done for that district.
This view is due to the design of the system. Congress was not
designed to efficiently advance the national welfare. It was designed
to efficiently represent and balance local interests. That is
what it does, and that is how voters think about it when they
make their vote choice. One should not criticize the average voter
for thinking locally when voting for Congress. He is playing his
role just as Madison and the Framers intended it.
Thus, because
of constitutional issues, reelection is a local affair. This is
why members of Congress focus so extensively on casework. Caseworking
is a way to win votes. If a member helps nudge the Social Security
Administration to more quickly process a disability claim, that
member has probably won himself a lifetime voter. Acquiring voters
is also why members waste so much money on the discretionary side
of spending. It “buys” members of Congress votes –
not by paying individuals off (though often businesses do indeed
get paid off – just ask
Ross Perot!), but rather by giving the impression to the folks
back home that the member is working for them. This is the root
cause of wasteful discretionary spending. It is not wasteful in
the strictest sense of the word. It is doing something
– it helps ensure reelection. A better word than “waste”
is “irresponsible”. Pork barrel spending is irresponsible.
It does nothing to enhance the public good.
Take an example.
Why did Shelly Moore Capito decide not to run against the 88-year
old Robert Byrd in West Virginia, a state that, by many measures,
is one of the most conservative in America? There are a number
of reasons, and you can see a good many of them on the drive down
I-79 from Morgantown to Charleston. His name is on every third
road sign. This is a symbol of Byrd’s extensive work for
the state. Ask the average West Virginian Bush voter what he thinks
of Byrd, and he will tell you that Robert Byrd is good for
West Virginia. He cares about West Virginians and he is doing
what he can to help them – the proof is in the pork. Byrd
is a Democrat, but this logic transcends party lines. And its
pull is more powerful than any member’s desire to limit
the size and scope of the federal government: limiting government
requires members to be in government, which in turn requires them
to expand government.
At the end
of the day, then, the Republican inability to control discretionary
spending is due to a few fundamental reasons: the way Congress
was designed, and how voters respond to that design; the fact
that politicians are careerists; and the power of Congress to
spend money. It is not because of a dearth of Republican mettle,
not because DeLay Republicans have overwhelmed Gingrich Republicans,
not because of co-optation by the Washington establishment, not
because of K Street coziness. It is because of several basic,
long-lasting features of American political life.
For his part,
Newt Gingrich recognized that irresponsible spending was a problem
that extended this deep. The Contract with America included three
provisions – term limits, line item veto and the balanced
budget amendment -- designed to control spending by changing some
of these fundamentals. Unfortunately, all three of them were incredibly
bad ideas. All three would have drastically diminished the power
of Congress. Term limits, while it would have changed the careerist
bent of the Congress, would also have diminished the policy expertise
within the body, as members would not be able to stay long enough
to develop deep knowledge of certain policy areas. Ultimately,
Congress would be able to oversee the executive bureaucracy less
effectively, and thus the executive branch would greatly increase
its power. The line-item veto and the balanced budget amendment
would both have limited Congress’s institutional ability
to control the purse, but they would have done so by bringing
the executive and judicial branches into decisions that have,
for centuries and by original design, been the prerogative of
Congress.
All three
of these proposals failed, and so the institutions that cause
discretionary spending remained unchanged, and so Congress kept
passing larger and larger spending bills. The fact that Congress
was almost always controlled by Republicans was irrelevant –
Republican members of Congress are, from the grass root’s
perspective, members of Congress first and Republicans second.
Or, from Key’s perspective, they are a different type of
Republican. Ideology, for them, comes second.
This is why
I think any proposal to eliminate earmarks will, ultimately, be
nothing more than a red herring. Republicans, if they manage to
end earmarks, will come home to their districts, declare victory
in the war against runaway discretionary spending, and then proceed
to find a new way to spend money to ensure reelection. One of
the reasons earmarks became so popular was because they were a
low-publicity way to dispense particularistic spending. Now that
the cover has been blown on earmarks, members will probably find
a new legislative trick to hide from public view their spending
habits.
Boehner,
or any congressional leader for that matter, does not have the
ability to stop this sort of spending. If the first argument of
this column is that members of Congress are members first and
partisans second, the second is that congressional leadership
is not nearly as strong as most pundits assume. Unlike European
party leaders, American leaders do not have coercive power over
their members. As Duke’s John Aldrich and Michigan State’s
David Rohde have argued, the strength of the party leadership
is conditional – it depends upon the cohesiveness of the
party caucus. Party leaders are able to enact the caucuses’
will; they are not able to impose their own will on the caucus.
This is why the congressional parties have become more powerful
in the last two decades: the party caucuses have become more ideologically
unified, they have come to a broader and deeper consensus about
policy, and they have empowered their leaders to achieve their
policy goals. When it comes to particularistic discretionary spending,
what is the consensus in the Republican caucus? It is that it
is a necessary ingredient for reelection, and that any alterations
to the logrolling system are strictly verboten.
If you want
to stop members of Congress from spending like drunken sailors,
you cannot presume that leaders full of tough talk will not do
anything except make people feel better. Cosmetic changes like
this are not sufficient for change. You will have to get your
hands dirty and start changing the way the system itself works.
Limit the powers of Congress, stop members from returning to it,
or change the local nature of the body. The first two seem obviously
bad to me. The third implies major changes in the role of Congress
in America. Is stopping pork barrel spending really worth such
deep alterations? Is the “Bridge to Nowhere” really
so noxious that we have to change the way our system works? I
tend to think that the answer is no. After all, Congress was never
meant to be a body that represented the interests of the nation
as a whole. It was meant to be a meeting of the representatives
of the different parts of the nation. Should we be surprised that
it spends money in ways that benefit the parts but not the whole?
Should we tinker around with the Madisonian system to change this?
That does not seem very conservative to me.
So, as the
title indicates, I am to be counted as one of the few defenders
of pork. Is it a good in itself? No, of course not. It is, however,
a consequence, an unfortunate side effect, of an otherwise very
excellent system of government. As getting rid of pork requires
one to tinker around with the system, I prefer pork.
Jay
Cost, creator of the Horse
Race Blog, is a doctoral candidate of political science at
the University of Chicago. He can be reached at jay_cost@hotmail.com.
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