by Matt Taibbi
As an aide to Domenici, he had been in charge of keeping track of the senator’s earmark requests—cataloging them, tracking their progress through the various committees, and, most important, making sure they appeared in the final texts of the bills. “When I first got to Domenici’s office, I was horrified that he had all of these pork requests in the defense bill,” he says now. “And there was no systematic way of keeping track of ’em. It was just a pile of documents. Now, as a staffer I was supposed to keep track of these fucking things. And there were fifty, sixty, eighty of them, who knows.
“So being an organizational wimp I started putting them in a table, keeping track of them. Here’s the item, here’s what the House Armed Services Committee did with it, here’s what the Senate Armed Services Committee did with it, here’s what the HAC [House Appropriations Committee] did with it, here’s what the SAC [Senate Appropriations Committee] did with it, and so on.”
Wheeler later explained to me that the table contained all sorts of information, including budget ID numbers, called PE numbers, and other info. “So in March,” he said, “[Senator Ted] Stevens, the Appropriations chairman, he always wanted senators to send a letter stating what their ‘state interest items’ are—earmarks, in other words—and after the second or third year, I started including my Word Perfect table with Domenici’s letters, to help the Appropriations Committee keep track of what the fuck each item was.
“Well,” Wheeler explained, “Stevens loved that, and after that, he required everybody to include that table. So I guess that’ll be my legacy.”
When the Democrats’ CR came out, I wrote to Wheeler and asked him to ID the earmarks in it for me. He wrote back and said there were several in the CR itself, including one on page 30, line 3, of the 137-page document. It read:
“That’s what an earmark looks like?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Wheeler. “Well, that’s one variety.” He went on to explain that the cancer research earmarks were a nearly twenty-year tradition in the Congress, the by-products of an ongoing War of the Roses–style gender piss-fest between various members of Congress.
“It all started in the nineteen-eighties, when Pat Schroeder started sticking in ‘women’s health services’ earmarks for breast cancer research,” Wheeler said. “Then in the nineties, the boys got jealous and stuck in earmarks for prostate cancer. Then the girls went back and stuck in ovarian cancer. I’ll bet you another lunch that we’ll get testicular cancer next year, earmark reform or not.”
All in all, there were about a half-billion dollars in earmarks in the “earmark-free” continuing resolution, which incidentally was sort of a canard to begin with. A CR is not a real budget; it is merely a mathematical formula that allows Congress to pay for government programs based on funding levels from, among other things, the previous year’s budget. There are almost never earmarks in a CR itself; the earmarks are usually in the actual budget the CR refers to. So when the Democrats promised an “earmark-free CR,” that was already funny—continuing resolutions, by nature, are almost always earmark-free anyway.
And yet in this case, the Democrats hit it both ways. They actually did put a half-billion dollars’ worth of earmarks in this, their first CR, and then, in the defense budget anyway, they explicitly left in the earmarks from the previous year’s budget. That is what the following passage from the CR means, when translated into human language:
Amounts made available in this section are subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2007…
Although the “earmarks” were said to have been removed from the budget, in fact the sums of money for the earmarks were left in the budget and distributed to the same agencies they had always been intended for. The money was still there, waiting to be spent—it just wasn’t called an earmark anymore.
“It’s an insult to Swiss cheese,” said Wheeler. “I’ll bet you that as we speak, staffers are calling agencies and saying, ‘We want to make sure that you know that all the money from last year is still there.’”
And indeed, less than a week or so after the CR passed, word leaked out that a Republican staffer from the Senate Appropriations Committee had been circulating an e-mail request for earmarks for the upcoming Labor–Health and Human Services (colloquially known as the “Labor H”) appropriations bill. The e-mail read:
The Labor-HHS deadline for all requests will be April 13, 2007.
This deadline includes any programmatic funding, project funding, bill or report language requests that your Senators would like to submit for the FY2008 LHHS bill.
Please submit all requests by e-mail and deliver a hard copy to SD-156.
The “project funding, bill or report language requests” called for in this letter—that’s Congress-ese for earmarks. The letter was irrefutable evidence that everything in Congress was back on the usual schedule. Appropriations season’s coming up, send us your Christmas list. Incidentally, Santa moved; he’s in the Democratic offices now.
SOME TIME LATER in the spring, the Democrats found themselves in a much-publicized bind. Charged with the responsibility of drawing up a budget for the unwanted Bush war, the Democrats—who had been elected on a mandate to end the conflict—were under heavy pressure to tie that funding to a timeline for withdrawal. And they initially did so, writing up an “Iraq supplemental” budget that made an exit timeline a precondition for funds disbursement.
That seemed like solid confrontational politics, except that the word soon leaked out that (a) President Bush planned on vetoing the supplemental and (b) the Democrats were almost certain to rework the budget the next time around, taking the timeline out. The whole withdrawal-timeline thing in this first pass at the war budget was therefore complete and total bullshit, a “message” sent to the president by a Congress that actually held all the power already. It would be cast in the press as an antiwar gesture; in reality it was a laborious piece of buck passing, the new Democratic majority trying to cast off its political mandate by pretending the president still held the cards. After all, the only real consequence of sending a vetoed budget back to the president (with a message to take it or leave it) would be the inevitable political fallout that would come from being slammed by Republicans for “failing to support the troops in harm’s way” or whatever. The Democrats expected all of us to respect their boundless, ball-sucking dread of that kind of criticism, respect the fact that not more than five or ten of them have the decency to recognize that their political careers matter less than their duty to rescue young Americans and Iraqis from pointless deaths.
They also expected us not to notice that the supplemental had turned out to be a forum for reintroducing the old politics as usual. This time, the relevant clause was at the end of the bill. It read as follows:
EARMARKS
Pursuant to clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of Representatives, this conference report contains no congressional earmarks, limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined in clause 9(d), 9(e), or 9(f) of rule XXI.
I went back to see Wheeler in Washington. He’d promised to teach me how to read congressional bills so I could learn to spot the pork in them. And this one, he said through very hearty laughs, was as chock full of crap as any of them. So I grabbed the Congressional Record for April 24, 2007—Congress puts out a volume every day with a transcript of all floor dialogue that includes the texts of all relevant legislation—and sat down in his small office in downtown D.C.
The supplemental, he explained, was broken into two parts. The first part was simply the text of the bill, and in this case included about twenty italicized pages under the heading “Conference Report on HR 1591.” The text of the bill summarized the contents of the supplemental in almost-readable prose, including the much-publicized section outlining the “benchmarks” the al-Maliki government of Iraq would have to follow in order to continue receiving military aid.
Wheeler directed me to ignore that section for now,
however, and flip forward to a section called the “Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of the Conference.” This was a much fatter section and had far less readable prose text; it was mostly numbers and tables.
“In any bill,” he said, “you always want to look at the joint explanatory statement first. That’s where you’ll find all the stuff. Here, for instance, look at this…”
He flipped forward to page H3946. It was a table that read:
EXPLANATION OF PROJECT LEVEL ADJUSTMENTS
(in thousands of dollars)
P-1
BUDGET REQUEST
HOUSE
SENATE
CONFERENCE
2 EA-18G Fund 1 EA-6B combat loss replacement
75,000
83,000
-367,000
75,000
75,000
0
4 F/A-18E/F (Fighter) Hornet (MYP) 3 F/A-18’s combat loss replacements
16,000
208,000
192,000
16,000
208,000
192,000
(cont’d)
“When you’re looking at earmarks,” Wheeler said, “you just read these tables. Look at the column for the administration’s request, then look at the last column, where it says ‘Conference.’ If the conference number is bigger than the administration number, you’ve usually got an earmark.
“Take a look at the number there for F/A-18’s. The administration only asked for sixteen million dollars, most likely replacement parts. But you look over at the House number, and that number is two hundred and eight million dollars. And voilà, at the end, the final number is two hundred and eight million dollars. So by this you can deduce that Murtha’s people in the House added three airplanes. That’s a House earmark.”
We flipped backward in the record.
“When you find an earmark,” he said, “you can usually go back in the text of the bill and find a little section that explains a little bit what the fuck the actual earmark is. In this case, go back a few pages, and you find this:
AIRCRAFT COMBAT LOSSES
The conferees have agreed to fund procurement of aircraft to replace combat losses. The conference agreement includes funding for three F/A-18 aircraft to directly replace F/A-18 aircraft lost in combat and to fund a single EA-6B which is a functional replacement for an EA-6B Prowler combat loss.
“Notice anything odd about that?” he asked.
“Since when do Iraqi insurgents shoot down fighter jets?” I asked.
“They don’t,” he said.
“Then what is this?” I asked.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I’d be interested to hear their answer to that, too.”
The supplemental was full of stuff like this, crammed to the brim with earmarks military and domestic. A friend on the Hill explained his theory on what had happened. “The Democrats needed to hand out that one hundred and twenty-four billion dollars in gifts just to get the votes to pass the timeline. So you hand out some farm stuff, some Katrina stuff, some antidrought stuff, and maybe even some military stuff to various southern and western congressmen who were on the fence about voting for an ‘antiwar’ measure.
“Then they send that timeline to Bush, Bush vetoes it, and now the Democrats have to find a way to save face. So they’ll send it back to Bush without the timeline, or with an ‘advisory’ timeline—but the price is that Bush has to sign off on the hundred and twenty-four billion dollars. Now you’ve got no timeline, and the antiwar vote the Congress was elected to cast isn’t going to be there, but what you do have is one hundred and twenty-four billion dollars in new spending. It’s beautiful. Rather than using the pork to leverage the timeline into law, they’ll use the timeline to leverage the pork into law.”
I called John Murtha’s office to ask about the F/A-18s. His press guy, Matt Mazonkey, came to the phone.
“Matt Mazonkey!” he said cheerfully.
“Hi,” I said. “My name is Matt Taibbi. I’m a reporter for Rolling Stone.”
“Oh, hey, Matt! What’s up?” he said, instantly adopting the buddies-for-life tone you often hear on the Hill from people you’ve never met and who, conversely, have never heard of you. I explained about the planes and asked if he knew the circumstances of those combat losses. I could almost hear him frowning on the other end of the line.
“What’s this story about?” he asked, after a pause.
“The supplemental,” I said unhelpfully. “I just saw this entry, and I was curious.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, I, uh, don’t know exactly when those planes were lost. But we’ll get back to you, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
I called the Pentagon and the navy, even walked into the navy congressional liaison office, and made a series of requests for information about the combat losses. No one seemed to know anything. The last communication I received from the navy read as follows:
Matt,
Wanted to let you know we are tracking this request.
LT Bashon W. Mann
GOLD Team Action Officer
CHINFO News Desk
Nobody ever got back to me about the planes. But the earmarks did end up staying in the final version of the supplemental, while the timeline had to wait for another day.
WHILE ALL of this supplemental stuff was going on, in early April, I went to a breakfast for a small group of reporters in the office of Bernie Sanders, the erstwhile Vermont congressman who in the anti-Bush fervor of the previous season had secured a startling promotion to the Senate. As a congressman Sanders had been a reporter’s dream. A true independent who didn’t rely on party money to win his elections—while Sanders caucused with the Democrats, he was technically an independent who relied upon his great name recognition and reputation in his tiny state—Sanders could be outspoken without fear of consequence. In years past he and his staff had been a great help in explaining the vagaries of Congress, including the ugly inner workings of the various committees. But Bernie was a senator now and he caucused with the majority party, which meant he had real power. It was not going to be possible anymore for him to play the role of an angry outsider. Moreover, when I’d dropped in on him a month or so before for an interview, he’d seemed overwhelmed by the differences between the House and the Senate. In particular he kept coming back to a story about his very first meeting with the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
At the meeting, the subject of the Head Start program had come up. Ted Kennedy, who runs the committee, had proposed a modest increase. Sanders wanted more—so he went and had a word with Kennedy after the meeting.
“The end result is that we got a 6 percent increase, instead of a 4 percent increase,” he said. “Over a three-year period, that’s five hundred million dollars more. What I’m finding out is it’s just a different world. Not saying it’s better, it’s just different. If you want something, you just go talk to someone in the hall. It’s all behind the scenes. Not like the House at all.”
He tried to sound like it was a good thing, and it might very well have been, in terms of getting more money for a worthy-enough program. But the subtext of this story was Sanders expressing amazement that he could get $500 million just by talking to someone. As any human being would, he looked blown away by the reality of his situation. I left his office that day feeling like the conversation had turned weird at the end.
About a month and a half later, Sanders sent out invitations to a small group of progressive journalists for a breakfast at his Dirksen office. For those who hadn’t had a chance to talk to him since his election, he wanted to reintroduce himself and remake a case he often made to reporters, appealing for the media’s help in breaking the power monopoly in Washington. There were about ten of us there, and the list included a couple of friends of mine, including David Sirota and a former Sanders aide named Joel Barkin. We had pastries and coffee and after a few minutes of chatting sat down around a coffee table
, with the senator planted in a central location on a couch. He immediately launched into a speech about trying to move the Congress in the direction of the public, handing out fliers with poll numbers to bolster his case. He told the same story about the HELP Committee meeting, Kennedy, and the $500 million. This went on for about a half hour, but when he opened up the discussion to questions, the reporters mostly blew off the senator’s presentation in favor of questions about the war. Sanders looked miffed at first, then bit his lip and tried to meet the reporters halfway.
At the time, the Senate was in the midst of a controversial vote over the Iraq supplemental budget; they were about to pass a version of the bill that included a timeline for scheduled withdrawal. It was well known that Bush was going to veto the bill and that the Democrats in the Senate would then be back to square one. The question on the reporters’ minds was what was going to happen after the veto. Would the Democrats compromise and take the timeline out? What would Sanders do in that case?
The odd thing about this scene was that the reporters’ consternation about the war was a mirror image of the public frustration over economic issues Sanders had given his speech about. The Senate was indeed far behind the public on the war; the public wanted the war ended now, no questions asked, while in the Senate the war was a political Gordian knot, impossible to take on directly. Sanders had called these reporters in to press them to pressure the Senate to be bolder and less politically calculating on health care, income disparity, and campaign finance reform, but ultimately he ended up defending the body’s gradualist approach on the war. Before he knew it, the onetime idealist outsider was defending the “realities” of senatorial procedure.