So what can be done, apart from denying Congress the money in the first place by keeping taxes low? Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona and Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain have one good idea, which is to bring more transparency to earmarking. They would require that every earmark be specifically included in the text of the legislation Congress is voting on. We’d also like to see a requirement that every earmark list its main Congressional sponsor and its purpose (other than to re-elect the Member).
Appropriators who control the spending process complain that this transparency would make the legislative process “unwieldy,” which would only be a good thing. The potential for embarrassment might deter Members from inserting the pork at all. And if they go ahead anyway, the sight of Dr. Coburn exposing these projects on the Senate floor would be both good theater and politically hygienic.
If Republicans were smart–notice the subjunctive–they’d go much further and pledge a pork moratorium for the rest of the year. This “zero tolerance for earmarks” idea is modeled after the famous “broken windows” concept of fighting crime by cleaning up petty vandalism. If Members can’t abuse the process on small items, they might be less willing to do it on entitlements as well.
But the best idea would be to bring the President back into the spending equation. As it stands, he proposes a budget and then has no influence until he decides to sign or veto a giant spending bill. A Constitutional version of the line-item veto has been a money-saver in many of the states, where more than 40 governors have the authority to strike individual items from spending bills. When Bill Clinton had the line-item veto (for one year, 1997, before the Supreme Court struck it down), he used it to save several billion dollars.
There’s another way to accomplish the same goal: Repeal the 1974 Budget Act in toto. This disastrous law, enacted by arguably the most liberal Congress in history, was designed to make it easier to spend, and one of the ways it did so was by stripping the President of the power to impound funds. The impoundment power was used by every President from Jefferson to Nixon to refuse to spend money if the funds were unnecessary. FDR used it to cancel billions of dollars that had been appropriated for domestic agencies so that every available dollar could be devoted to the war.