Earmarks That Once Were Delicacy Now Are Poison
Congressional Quarterly
Melissa Attias
Bringing federal money back home used to be a plus for members of Congress, but not in Republican circles this year, and certainly not in Kansas, where Republican House membersTodd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran are locked in a Senate primary battle over whose earmarked spending is the worst.
Whoever wins the primary five weeks from now will be the prohibitive favorite to succeed Republican Sam Brownback , who is running for governor.
Tiahrt, who has represented the Wichita area since 1995 and is the No. 7 Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, helped secure more than $63 million in appropriations earmarks for the current fiscal year, ranking 31st out of 435 representatives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense. In one of his television commercials, Moran dubs his colleague-turned-rival “one of Washington’s biggest spenders”; Tiahrt has said the requests were to strengthen Kansas’ economy.
Moran, who has represented the state’s vast western plains since 1997, helped get more than $18 million in earmarks and ranks 196th. But he argues that his requests were all for nonprofit groups back home. The earmark process, he says, has been “hijacked by spending interests” — an accusation the Tiahrt campaign calls hypocrisy “insulting” to the state’s voters.
The fight, says Burdett A. Loomis, a long-time political science professor at the University of Kansas, is to be expected. “You’ve got this primary race in which two candidates who are quite conservative and have similar scores are trying to differentiate themselves,” he says.
Given the vehement opposition of tea party conservatives to federal spending and earmarks, Loomis says, the campaign “makes sense.”
Tiahrt has another problem, though. He was investigated and exonerated by the House ethics panel for his connection to the now- defunct PMA Group, a lobbying firm that specialized in getting earmarks for clients. And he helped secure more than $23 million in earmarks for organizations that contributed to his campaign, compared with Moran’s $5 million, according to the earmark database.
“That’s the kind of stuff that good campaign ads can be made of — and can be mined quite aggressively,” said Joseph A. Aistrup, a political scientist at Kansas State University.
“People are not crazy about earmarks, but they like money,” Loomis said. “It’s not clear how this all plays out.”
At the moment, though, things seem to be breaking Moran’s way: His early lead in the polls has only widened in recent months.
