Ending earmarks to be hard for Obama

SEATTLE — Barack Obama promises to change the way business is done in Washington.

But the economic crisis and a stack of unfinished legislation awaiting his arrival will test his commitment to his core pledge.

Priority legislation to bail out the auto industry and stimulate the economy — as well as nine overdue spending bills — are likely to come to his desk larded with earmarks.

Obama faces a dilemma: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and such powerful lawmakers as Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., staunchly defend earmarks. And powerful lobbyists, who raise campaign cash for lawmakers, still clamor for these pet projects.

Obama made this ambitious pledge during the campaign: “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” But he hasn’t been specific about how he intends to accomplish this.

With so many pressing economic tasks on his plate and so many entrenched interests on Capitol Hill, earmark critics are in suspense on whether Obama will deliver on his pledge to change Washington.

“If he’s going to do anything, he’s going to have to expend some political capital,” said Steve Ellis, of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Earmarks, favors that lawmakers hand out to bypass the normal selection process, are controversial and unpopular. A CBS News poll in 2007 found that two-thirds of Americans consider them unacceptable.

Two critics, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., are crafting a new earmark-reform bill.

Obama proposes databases that tie together campaign contributions and ethics disclosures by lawmakers and another linking lobbying and federal contracts. The Seattle Times has created a database for the 2007 and 2008 defense bills that links earmarks to lawmakers, campaign giving and lobbyists.

Obama also proposes to slash earmarks to their 1994 level, $7.8 billion. But what definition of an earmark will he use in trying to cut them?

Congress in 2008 said it had cut earmarks dramatically. But The Seattle Times examined the defense bill and found that Congress failed to disclose $3.5 billion of them — 40 percent of the total — because it used a new, more narrow definition of earmark.

Obama has straddled the issue. As a freshman senator, he began requesting earmarks, though he tried to limit his requests to public projects, schools and nonprofits.

Still, Obama asked for $740 million in earmarks in his first three years in the Senate and got $220 million of them approved.

One request he failed to push through was $1 million in 2006 for an expansion at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where his wife, Michelle, was a vice president.

The public perception that lawmakers can get something in return for their earmarks fuels the controversy over the earmark process. McCain calls the practice “corrupt.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama began distancing himself from earmarks. He stopped asking for them in the Senate and, after some hesitation, released a detailed list of all of his earmark requests, even his unsuccessful ones.

A revealing example of his evolution on earmarks came in a fight over a major ethics bill in 2007.

Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006 in the wake of earmarking scandals, including the convictions of lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged to have the “most open and honest Congress in history.”

At Pelosi’s direction, the House required members to disclose for each earmark the name and address of the company or group expected to receive it. Leaders in the Senate, however, offered no such rule.

Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., tried in January 2007 to add Pelosi’s language to the Senate ethics bill.

“The whole theory behind this is it would shame people into not doing the totally ridiculous earmarks,” DeMint recently told The Seattle Times.

But Majority Leader Reid said during debate on the Senate floor that the rules were not well thought out.

DeMint didn’t think he had the votes. But after the debate, he said, Obama walked up to him and said he supported DeMint’s proposal. Obama and five other Democrats bucked their leadership and — by a single vote — kept DeMint’s disclosure rule alive.

Once this measure caught the attention of the national media, the Senate approved it 98-0.