Inside Politics

Earmarks

“What were they smoking?”

That’s how an editorial writer and columnist for the Wall Street Journal responded, answering a question with a question Friday at the Heritage Foundation.

The question that had been posed to Kimberley A. Strassel was, what did she think of Thursday’s selection of Rep. Jo Bonner of Alabama by the House Republican Steering Committee for a vacant seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee over Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona.

The selection of Mr. Flake, a fiscal hawk whose candidacy for the Appropriations seat was backed by several conservative advocacy groups, would have sent a strong signal that Republicans were serious about reforming the budgetary earmarks system. Earmarks are pet projects inserted by members of Congress into legislation.

Passing over Mr. Flake “undercuts their own message,” Mrs. Strassel told the monthly luncheon gathering of the Conservative Women’s Network, co-sponsored by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.

Unlike Mr. Flake, Mr. Bonner has regularly requested earmarks for his district. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said Mr. Bonner was chosen because of his dedication to changing the system of earmarks.

Mrs. Strassel said some Republicans appear to think that it would be “one-sided suicide” to forgo pork-barrel projects unless Democrats were willing to do likewise. But she told the gathering that voters would “reward people for taking the right stand.”

Benchmarks

“A year ago, when neither the war nor political reconciliation was going well, the Bush administration reluctantly agreed to 18 benchmarks for judging progress in Iraq. And the Democratic Congress eagerly wrote the benchmarks into law, also requiring that the administration report back in July and September on whether the benchmarks were being met,” Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard.

“Despite the surge of additional American troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy, the reports found little progress on the political benchmarks requiring tangible steps toward reconciliation between Shia and Sunnis. Democrats insisted this meant the surge had failed,” Mr. Barnes said.

“They had a point, but not anymore. The surge, by quelling violence and providing security, was supposed to produce ‘breathing space’ in which reconciliation could take place. Now it has, not because President Bush says so, but based on those same benchmarks that Democrats once claimed were measures of failure in Iraq.

“Last week, the Iraqi parliament passed three laws that amounted to a political surge to achieve reconciliation. Taken together, the laws are likely to bring minority Sunnis fully into the political process they had earlier boycotted and to produce a new class of political leaders.

“Just as important is what the laws reflect in Iraq today. ‘The whole motivating factor’ behind the legislation was ‘reconciliation, not retribution,’ says U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker, who has never sugarcoated the impediments to progress in Iraq. This is ‘remarkably different’ from six months ago, he said.”

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