I think I've come up with the ultimate earmark: "BioAgroEco Infrastructure Improvements to 911 Communications, Chesapeake Oyster Protection and Endless Preparations for BRAC - Plus a Little Something for Girl Scouts, Easter Seals and Victims of Head Trauma."
Reading through the earmark wish lists that Maryland's congressional representatives have compiled, I thought of that old song about the ultimate country lyrics, covering all the bases beloved by that genre: "Well, I was drunk the day my mama got out of prison, and I went to pick her up in the rain. But before I could get to the station in a pickup truck, she got runned over by a damned old train."
So it is with the earmarks that Maryland's delegation are requesting - all the usual suspects on the state's checklist of the deserving get a nod, or five: the bay, the police, the children, the military, the medical research.
Thanks to the new transparency that Congress is now supposed to be operating under when it comes to the hot topic of earmarks, House members had to make public which projects they want funded in the 2010 budget. (Senators have a later deadline to do the same.)
Earmarks, of course, became a campaign issue last year, denounced as the ultimate in government waste and pork barrel spending. Never mind that a) they represent a tiny fraction, 1 percent or 2 percent, of total federal spending and b) their loudest critics often turned out to be the same ones who requested and accepted them for their states.
Still, earmarks remain the potato chip of politicians. They may be bad for you - some opponent is likely to find a mockable request you've made involving fruit flies or volcanoes - but they're ultimately irresistible.
For all the cheap and easy outrage you can generate by highlighting a project that seems trivial - some of the great advances in science, after all, have come from research involving fruit flies - surely earmarks have funded some worthy local projects that otherwise wouldn't have come to the attention of those who control the budget in Washington.
So the solution was not to outlaw earmarks but to make the process a more public one: Congressional representatives now have to publish their earmark requests on their official Web sites, rather than springing them at the last minute attached to some legislation as it heads to the floor for a vote. For all the grandstanding about the evils of earmarks, and while some missed the April 4 deadline for publishing their wish lists, most House members managed to find a few projects that deserved funding.
