Pelosi Hints Decision May Be Near On Earmark Moratorium

CQ Politics reports:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi indicated Thursday that a decision may be near on imposing an moratorium on appropriations earmarks.

“My patience is running out on earmarks,’’ she said. “We’ll have them or we won’t have them. We won’t spend a lot of time talking about them.’’

Republican leaders have demanded a complete moratorium, even though the number of earmarks has significantly decreased since Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007. Pelosi is considering the move as a demonstration of fiscal responsibility.

An earmark cutoff would be a dramatic change to business as usual. Incumbents would no longer be able to point to such directed spending to demonstrate a local benefit to sending them to Washington.

Minority Leader John A. Boehner , R-Ohio, meanwhile took credit for getting Democrats to consider adopting his position. He predicted Pelosi would move quickly.

“The Democratic leadership has finally decided to join Republicans in a moratorium on earmarks,’’ he said. “It looks like we will vote on this next week. If not, we should.’’

Still, Boehner criticized Democrats for what he said was an effort to spend the money from eliminated earmarks, rather than cut spending.

“If we’re going to eliminate wasteful spending, we should not add more wasteful spending,’’ he said.

Boehner said Democrats want to increase spending on infrastructure, in part as an anti-recession measure. But he said such spending would resemble earmarks because projects would be “divvied up’’ among member districts and allow lawmakers to take credit for bringing home federal dollars.

He also said an appropriations moratorium this year would not, in the end, have much an impact because the appropriations process might not be completed this year until after until after a new president is elected in November.

“We’re not going to do appropriations this year anyway, so we’re not giving up anything anyway,’’ he said.