Return of earmarks

Kimberley Strassel, in a Wall Street Journal article last week, explained how all the pious talk by congresscritters of both parties about how they were going to stop putting all those pesky earmarks into appropriations and other bills -- usually special-interest spending projects that benefited somebody in their district, or maybe a big d0nor -- is turning to earmarks in a different form.

"All across Washington, members are at this moment phoning budget officers at federal agencies -- Interior, Defense, HUD, you name it -- privately demanding that earmarks in previous legislation be fully renewed this year. There might not be a single official earmark in the 2007 spending bill, but thousands are in the works all the same," writes Ms. Strassel. If anything, she argues, the new process will receive less scrutiny than before, because the earmark requests will show up in the requested budgets of the agencies rather than being slipped in at the last minute by the congresscritter him or herself.

It may be a more labor-intensive process, but that's why the taxpayers give the congresscritters big staffs. When I worked in the House, back in the 1970s, it was strictly forbidden by law (and still is, I'm pretty sure) for in-house staffers to work on the re-election campaign. Yet the guy I worked for was the only one I knew about who actually enforced this rule on staffers(and his AA ignored it and worked full-time on the campaign from about July). He lost in 1974. You could walk down the halls of House office buildings and overhear phone conversations that were obviously campaign-related. Technically staffers were supposed to take a leave of absence if they did campaign work, but nobody even bothered to conceal the fact that staffers were doing campaign work. They probably do bother to conceal it now, but I'll bet it goes on.