The earmark process is a seemingly innocuous but egregious example of the federal government usurping the power that belongs to each state.
Republican leaders have caved to the demand of Tea Party activists and have vowed to extend the temporary ban on earmarks. Earmarks account for less than 1 percent of the federal budget, totaling approximately $15.9 billion of federal funds. These are used to finance projects in specific districts. The public outcry to ban earmarks and curb spending is justified in an era in which the government has a $1.3 trillion deficit. However small a sum in comparison, it is nonetheless a step in the right direction.
Moreover, by engaging in earmarks, the existing power elite have deviated from the vision of the Founding Fathers by not upholding the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution: powers not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states and the people. Sometimes our leaders defy the Tenth Amendment brazenly and other times they violate it so subtlety that they do not even notice themselves doing it. The Civil War, World War I, the Depression, World War II, and then the Cold War all resulted in individual states sacrificing more of their autonomy to the federal government. The Tenth Amendment was continually sacrificed by the states on the altar of national unity, and states rights were continually usurped by an ever-expanding national government. Earmarks are a largely unnoticed feature of that evolution.
Earmarks are a constant series of bloodletting. They are small cuts in the body politic of America; they lead to what the Chinese call 'death by a thousand cuts'—and, appropriately, the Chinese are helping to finance the cost of this U.S. national surgery. Once these cuts are made, inevitably some of the incisions slice a vein or an artery and lead to a national financial hemorrhage, as we witnessed during the scandalous Obamacare legislative process.
Often, individual earmarks per se may aggregate a small portion of any budget; but they are the bribes that help politicians get re-elected even when they support massive spending legislation which does not benefit—and usually harms—constituents from their own states.
The disingenuous rationale for earmarks is that individual senators and congressman know better than their colleagues what is good for their own particular state. But that should not be the litmus test of appropriate spending. In the first place, why should the federal government pay for specific projects of any state? Secondly, the governors of each state should know the state's individual needs better than those politicians sent to far-off Washington, DC. In many cases, those elected to the House and Senate are not 'representatives,' since once in Washington they usually only represent themselves in seeking a career status. So if, for example, the State of New York needs another bridge somewhere, the governor of New York should finance it with money raised in New York, even if this means debt financing by selling New York bonds to others outside of the state. This also gives the citizens of the state closer monitoring and control of spending, and prevents the nebulous fog of national expenditures. This was well anticipated by the Founding Fathers.
Why should taxpayers in Wyoming, for example, pay for a bridge in New York? The answer: they should not. This leads to bribery: the politicians from Wyoming, in turn, put in their own congressional earmarks so that all the other states can pay for Wyoming's pet projects. And on it goes. So the congressional leadership gets its massive spending bill supported by politicians who do not even agree with the legislation, and the various senators and members of Congress get credit from the citizens of their own states for having ‘brought home the bacon’—without the citizens realizing that it probably would have been cheaper to finance their own project instead of participating in the financing of projects in 49 other states.
In addition, when earmarks are used, no governor is blamed for spending; rather, ‘that terrible group in Washington, DC’ is held accountable and lambasted. The governors are continually surrendering their Tenth Amendment responsibilities and powers to the vague 'federal government' in order to get the 'other taxpayers in other states' to pay for local projects.
State power no longerresides exclusively with the governor; it is increasingly usurped by politicians sent to Washington. Hence, increasingly governors want to become senators and the Tenth Amendment suffers more every year. Governors surrender their chief executive powers, and their state's autonomy, to corrupt professional politicians who go to the nation’s capital where in the distance their misdeeds are more easily disguised as benefits.
The national politicians then have a few problems. They cannot find the money to pay for their expenditures, are enervated from attempting to read vast spending bills (which, sadly, often go unread altogether)and are exhausted from lack of sleep because they must pass these laws in the middle of the night to hide them from public view. So they, in turn, surrender their financial power to the Federal Reserve Bank to monetize the spending deficits, and thereby give up control to an unknown third party. Constitutional power reserved for Congress is thus unlawfully surrendered to the Federal Reserve Bank, under the pretense that it is part of the US government. In fact, the Federal Reserve Bank cannot even be audited and no one knows who owns it. Thomas Jefferson aptly warned us that a national bank "is more dangerous than a standing army."
In essence, we have surrendered too much of the power that belongs to the people and the states to a behemoth central government. "Give me control of a nation's money,” said international banking mogul Mayer Rothschild, “and I care not who makes the laws." Banning earmarks is a small cry in defense of the Tenth Amendment and a step toward restoring the balance in our Constitution.
-Charles Sutherland is an international business consultant and author.
