- We can't afford bridges to nowhere.
- The Teapot Museum. - The Cornhusker kickback.
- The US senator accused
of wasting millions of dollars through earmarks.
- For years, earmarks were vilified
as wasteful and corrupt spending.
But now, a decade after Congress banned the practice --
-Today, Republicans adopted an earmark ban.
- Congressional Democrats are bringing it back.
- Today, I'm announcing that the Senate Appropriations Committee
will again accept requests
for congressionally directed spending items.
- When a member of Congress inserts a line saying,
"Here's a certain amount of money that's gonna go
to a specific project,"
usually in that legislator's district, that's an earmark.
- The origins of the modern-day
earmark debate began in the 1990s.
- In 1998, a famously powerful
Transportation Committee chairman,
Bud Shuster, ran that committee,
and he came up with an earmark system
in which basically every member of Congress could get earmarks.
- Our country needs to be tied together
more closely in transportation than ever before.
- In 2005, Don Young of Alaska
was chairman of the Transportation Committee,
and he took what was already a pretty big earmark system
and blew it out of the water.
- It was always transparent.
I was always proud of my earmarks.
I believe in earmarks.
- The explosion of earmarks, combined with infamous projects,
like the Bridge to Nowhere and the Big Dig,
brought new scrutiny on the system.
- This is Gravina Island Highway,
but there's no one on this road.
Many locals call it the Road to Nowhere.
- So, the more this went on, the earmarks began to look like
they were part of a corrupt system,
and, in fact, they were.
- White House contacts with now-convicted
lobbyist Jack Abramoff
and his associates were far more extensive
than the White House has ever acknowledged.
- And he built an entire practice
that was just based really on earmarks
and getting earmarks to his clients.
- Democrats sought to clean up the earmark process
when they regained control of Congress
in the 2006 midterm elections.
- Strengthen the definition of earmarks
and strengthen criminal and corruption laws.
- And when Republicans retook the House of Representatives
in 2010,
fueled in part by a Tea Party wave
that campaigned against wasteful spending,
they ended the practice altogether.
- Put a moratorium on earmarks until we have a balanced budget.
- Earmarks have become emblematic
of everything that's wrong.
- Also, at the same time,
you had a Democratic president, Barack Obama,
who had only spent four years in Congress.
And Obama had never served on an appropriations committee.
He didn't like this look, either.
- If a bill comes to my desk
with earmarks inside, I will veto it.
- When Democrats announced the return of earmarks in February,
they added new checks into the system,
including a cap on earmark requests for each member
and additional transparency measures.
- Earmarks are, to be clear,
not the sort of magic-bullet solution
to all of the things
that ail the congressional appropriations process.
Historically, earmarks have not always been
especially transparent.
The current approach that Congress is using
does have a lot of transparency in it.
- House and Senate Democrats, along with House Republicans,
have voted to bring back earmarks within their caucuses,
with a hope that this will spur more bipartisanship
and less brinksmanship.
- There's been a situation in Congress for a while now,
where the minority party doesn't like to authorize
spending proposed by the majority party.
- And it's led to a lot of government shutdowns.
- We are now six hours into the nation's
first government shutdown since 1996.
- Day one of the government shutdown.
- Major parts of the federal government are shut down.
- The idea of bringing earmarks back
would allow rank-and-file members
to get some of what they want included in spending bills,
though not everyone agrees.
- If they have earmarks, and we don't,
hopefully you knock out the earmarks,
and therefore you have less spending.
- They're trying now to find this middle ground, doing away
with a lot of the corruption and the wasteful earmarks
and instead trying to do stuff
that is just good for each individual district.