Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that he will join fellow Republicans in supporting a temporary ban on earmarks, a move that reflects the force of the anti-spending mood in Washington.
McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was thought to oppose to such a ban. But he took to the floor of the Senate, just moments after Congress reconvened following the midterm elections break, to announce his decision.
“I have thought about these things long and hard over the past few weeks,” McConnell said. “Nearly every day that the Senate’s been in session for the past two years, I have come down to this spot and said that Democrats are ignoring the wishes of the American people. When it comes to earmarks, I won’t be guilty of the same thing.”
“I know the good that has come from the projects I have helped support throughout my state. I don’t apologize for them,” McConnell said. “But there is simply no doubt that the abuse of this practice has caused Americans to view it as a symbol of the waste and the out-of-control spending that every Republican in Washington is determined to fight.”
McConnell, who defended earmarks in his floor statement and said he was “reluctant” to give them up, made his decision under tremendous pressure from fiscal hawks in his own party. Two hours before his speech a few hundred conservative activists rallied on the Capitol grounds against Democratic measures they fear could be passed during the lame duck session between now and January.
An hour before McConnell took to the floor, Sens. Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint held a conference call on the matter in which Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, said lawmakers who oppose the ban are “lazy.”
“They really do not want to do the oversighting of a $4 trillion budget,” Coburn said, declaring that instead of one oversight hearing for every 1,000 earmarks, the ratio should be reversed.
“The bureaucracies can’t spend money unless we allow it,” he said. “What we’ve decided is we’re just going to let the bureaucracies spend their money and we’ll spend ours.”
“What we ought to do is we ought to be oversighting every penny the federal government spends everywhere.”
Senate Republicans are scheduled to hold a conference-wide vote on the matter Tuesday. But Coburn said in a conference call with DeMint and reporters that if the Senate GOP fails to pass the earmark ban in what will be a secret ballot vote, he would push for the full Senate to vote on such a measure when a food safety bill comes to the floor this week.
House Republicans are set to pass their own measure banning earmarks on Tuesday. While the House GOP is guaranteed to pass a moratorium, there has been some division within the Senate GOP.
Sen. James Inhofe, also a Republican from Oklahoma, has publicly argued that the GOP should not ban earmarks because it would cede too much power over spending to the executive branch. McConnell was also thought to be opposed to an earmark ban.
DeMint praised McConnell’s decision as “the kind of bold leadership our party needs.”
By supporting the ban, McConnell avoided an embarrassing defeat by insurgent forces within his own party, and went on the offensive against President Obama, seeking to put him under pressure to cut spending.
“With Republican leaders in Congress united, the attention now turns to the president. We have said we are willing to give up discretion, now we’ll see how he handles spending decisions,” McConnell said. “And if the president ends up with total discretion over spending, we will see even more clearly where his priorities lie.”
House Republican leader John Boehner, of Ohio, echoed that message, saying that “House and Senate Republican leaders are listening to the American people, and are united in support of an earmark ban.”
“We hope President Obama and Washington Democrats will show they are serious, and join us in this effort to restore the public trust,” Boehner said.
But Obama was quick to respond and point the finger back at Republicans, noting that he has worked against earmark waste since his time in the Senate.
“I welcome Senator McConnell’s decision to join me and members of both parties who support cracking down on wasteful earmark spending, which we can’t afford during these tough economic times,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House.
“As a Senator, I helped eliminate anonymous earmarks, and as President, I’ve called for new limitations on earmarks and set new, higher standards of transparency and accountability,” Obama said.
“But we can’t stop with earmarks as they represent only part of the problem. In the days and weeks to come, I look forward to working with Democrats and Republicans to not only end earmark spending, but to find other ways to bring down our deficits for our children,” he said.