ongoing series in the august lunchtime lecture series we have. this program was set up a long time ago by my colleague. we all know that there are people behind the scenes that really make this stuff happen. for us that's lauren and she put together this program to include some really interesting lectures and discussions. today's is no exception. i'll be introducing you to laura blessing, but before i do that i wanted to just point out that we have a couple more lectures coming up before the end of the series. the series is taking place on wednesdays is longer than usual because there are five wednesdays in august. plus, lauren gave us a bonus in september. so i hope you're around for all of those. today's by laura blessing is very interesting. it's something that i haven't thought a lot about. i tend to think more historically. she approaches public policy issues from a historical perspective. and this year i have come to realize is a biggy. you probably know that, that's why you're here. dr. blessing is a senior fellow since 2015 at georgetown university's government affairs institute. she graduated from the university of virginia, but like you probably all know, capitol hill is where you really get schooled. she worked as an american political science association congressional fellow, serving as a legislative assistant for a senior member of the ways and means committee. i want to alert you to the fact that she's working on a book now on the politics of tax policy from the mid 20th century to today. keep your eyes open for that one. help me welcome laura. [ applause ] >> thank you, chuck. thank you to the capitol historical society. i'm delighted to be here and to be in such great company with the other speakers in the series on the very important topic of congressional capacity and people's ongoing research for that. i've got my pointer. ta da. i won't let this power go to my head. this is my road map for today. we'll talk a little bit about our puzzle, why study earmarks and the earmarks ban. a series of congressional politics, background, a story of how we got to this point. where the earmarks ban was created. and different effects of the ban. so these are the major effects i'm pointing out. so effects on legislating, on the power of the appropriations committee and tools that party leadership has at its disposal. that's where we go from here. okay. here's our puzzle. why study earmarks? why study the earmarks ban? what does that mean for congressional capacity? before i delve into this -- and i promise you i'm not going to read all that. i need to define what an earmark in fact is. in a nutshell while this is the definition from the house rules, an earmark is a specific pot of money for a specific thing in a specific place requested by a specific member of congress. that's the most simplistic way i can put it. we have far more technical definitions. to be sure this is almost identical in the senate rules. they refer to it as congressionally directed spending. it sounds a lot less prone for, you know, that mean campaign add. and other groups will define it more broadly. so it seems to focus particularly on earmarks has circumventing their allocation process. anti-earmarks group such as citizens against government waste have a broader definition as one might expect. okay. these are all examples of how people typically to date have talked about earmarks in terms of theories of congressional politics. you know, how is congress organized, is it organized for distributive purposes to give out the goods as it were? is it organized for informational purposes to get greater information? is it organized for partisan ends? to be sure, we have, you know, giants in the political science literature on all of those marks. as well as how earmarks have been strategically used. people ask, well, you know, are there differences between the house and the senate? are there differences in how they're strategically used to benefit specific members of congress with leadership, appropriators and vulnerable members of congress being more able to get earmarks than other groups. and in fact when you have a massive influx of earmarks requested particularly after they started with the online forums, you had staff members who literally would have lists along those exact same categories that political scientists would then show up with the regression data for, you know, people to prioritize. how have earmarks been used for building coalitions? i think of evan's work here. there's also enormative questions. are earmarks a good idea? are they a good idea in terms of being able to have a balance of power with the executive to perhaps respond to local conditions? to redress inequalities. are there particular earmarks that people think this might be an example of good public policy? somebody in the room always brings up drones at this point. i probably should have had a more exciting powerpoint on that. but a great of example of people who have dived into those questions as well. for me, and certainly for the theme of this august series, i think that the bigger take away is not these questions, although to be sure, the earmarks ban is important for all of these larger issues. i think it has particular implications for theories of distributive politics. but the take away is important for congressional capacity. the earmarks ban i'm going to argue drives congressional dysfunction in a lot of different ways. so how did we get here? we have been earmarking things for a long time. the earliest earmark -- i'm sure this is not the 100% original lighthouse, but it's cute. the earliest earmark is from 1789. this is the cape henry lighthouse in virginia. it cost $147,169.54. ever since the cape henry lighthouse, there have been different historical opportunities for members of congress to earmark two different ends. you know, while the first couple of presidential administrations did not see a ton of earmarking, you see a growth of them during the paolitics of the early 1800. you see plenty of opportunities for them during world war ii and fighting the great depression. you see opportunities with the great society in terms of community development projects, in terms of public health. you see opportunities for earmarks in 1970s environmental legislation. you know, this will -- a lot of the water development projects that members of congress were so fond of and president carter wanted to rail against so heavily and so purically. as well as yjust the interest groups politics coming out of that time period. to skip forward a little bit, their increased use, particularly from 1994 to about 2006 brought increased attention. these numbers are from crs. the congressional research service. again, different places occasionally measure what institutes an earmark different ways. but you can see here that you're basically doubling the number of earmarks that are getting passed in legislation every year. this is pretty significant. this is a very large influx that also comes out whenever you have interviews with different people who are part of the process during during this time. with you know, in 1994, the republicans running against among other things, run on issues of fiscal responsibility and running against earmarks were part of their message. thereafter, however, party leadership particularly newt gingrich found it to be very politically advantageous to use earmarks to retain his majority as best he could. which sets up a later political fights from both sides. you know, to be sure, it's not as if earmarks had not been a contentious topic in earlier times but you really see from the mid-'90s up through you know, the ban as being of particularly contentious. so carter rails against them. he loses. everyone, you have a widespread citation of this is being kind of disastrous messaging for his -- and for his relationships with congress. reagan also you know derides things that having bills that are loaded with pork omb director miller fought against earmarks a little bit, too. but the sustained push really comes from the mid-1990s on. and interestingly, earmarks are given out on largely a nonpartisan basis. so your majority is going to get a few more than the minority in these bills over time. but you have seen both parties as soon as greater attention was brought to this both parties have really stepped into politicize it. so the republicans highlighting claims for fiscal conservatism, claims after wasteful spending by the democrats. the democrats in turn highlighting the hypocrisy of the republicans. they're both of course, doing the same exact thing with their actual policy. and this sets up a lot of different fights. so speaker boehner when he was running for speaker in 2006, he senses the weakness of party leadership at this time. of course, he's stepping in right after tom delay had to vacate the speakership post haste. and he wins very narrowly over whip roy blunt at the time. and he does that as a reform candidate. he reaches out to the more fiscally members of the caucus. he will embraces you know, the banning of earmarks as one of these issues that he's going to run on. and he really you know, makes this his issue. you have some transparency reforms in 2007 where members have to publicly identify the earmarks that they're requesting. you have a series of different scandals or scandals with quotation marks around them that get popularized in the press. some of them are just the old fashioned kind. i've got a lovely picture of duke cunningham here. you can't quite see it but he has a lovely pinstriped suit. he looks like the kind of guy who might sell a defense subcommittee earmark and apply the plead guilty of it. if that was your read of the photo you're correct. you also have people obliquely mentioned in terms of being connected to earmark scandals but weren't entirely, people like jack abramoff and you have the bridge to nowhere which i've put in quotation marks. this is probably the piece of journalism on earmarks that has gotten the widest political attention. it started getting attention in 2004 when the name was coined. it's finally stripped out of you know, the bills in 2007. this was connecting a very small alaskan town to a very small alaskan island of about 50 people. and if you ask appropriation staffers today the first thing that will come out of their mouths is that this was not an aappropriations bill. it was a t & i bill, transportation and instruct. it was not their fault and they got punished for it. but there was always a purpose behind it. they were trying to make it a bridge to somewhere, trying to prompt economic development. both sides bow lit sized this. this becomes an issue in the 2008 election with you know, many memorable quotations from senator mccain, governor sarah palin, and you know, candidate obama. interestingly, right after the 2010 elections, november is the month of november is not even over, and both the house and senate republicans put in earmarks ban into their house republican conference rules and the senate rules for the republican caucus. in january of 2011, president obama essentially ratifies this by saying in his state of the union address that he would not vote for any bill that contained earmarks and we have had the ban ever since. i would also note that the house appears to have more enthusiasm for the ban than the senate. okay. so that's our story. i want to highlight three major effects of the earmarks ban. the first is in difficulty legislating. legislating got hard after 2010. it just got really, really difficult. i'd also like to point out that by any reasonable conception, earmarks are policy. you know, you have to bring people together. you have to consider stakeholders. you have to consider what the legislation does. they're often not talked about in this particular way but i would proffer that for you. so this is speaker boehner saying, and i've used a more generic example with the highway bill here. i'm going to talk about appropriations in a second. he says when it comes to things like the highway bill which used to be bipartisan you understand it was greased to be bipartisan with 36,371 earmarks. you take the earmarks away and guess what, all of a sudden people are beginning to look at the real policy behind it. so you've seen, you know, a real difficulty when you don't have the grease for the legislative wheels so to speak. there are a lot of different ways that you could measure for different metrics of legislating getting hard. i'm going to talk about appropriations bills because you can compare them over time and compare like things. and you know, most of those subcommittee bills stay the same or are largely the same over time. i'm going to take ten of the now 12 billses to compare. i will mention that in talking about budget break down, you know, other people sometimes use numbers that or metrics that are certainly interesting but don't always get at the underlying dynamics of that break do you know whether it's the last time that we passed everything on time, which would be 1994. the last time ha we passed all the appropriations bills which would be 1996. the number of crs or you know continuing resolutions where you essentially fund the government at continuing levels with perhaps a few anomalies in there that are part of the process. if a short term cr or two gets to you your budget process you may still have a relatively normal process. the -- one of the metrics i think is probably the most significant and which does not as you'll see in a second warrant sits own chart is that the calendar year of 2009, that would be fiscal year 2010, was the last time we passed an aappropriations bill, passed it through the house, passed it through the senate. took it to conference, had the president sign it. that is the last time that we've done this. we have not passed a single appropriations bill individually into law since the earmarks ban. that is awfully significant. i'm also going to show you that this is for all of my ten appropriations bills that i'm going to show you in just a minute, i allot of these bills are simply not getting votes on the floor of the house at all. i'm acrossing to show you the floor of the house as opposed to the senate. the house starts the process as dictated in the 1974 budget act. and the senate by custom tends not to even bring up an aappropriation s bill if it hasn't been passed by the house. so we're looking at exactly where the process starts to break down here by looking at house appropriations bills. and i'm not going to spend a ton of time on each of these individually. but i've got the break down of ten different appropriation subcommittee bills both democrats and republicans voting yes, and no and you see a lot of blank spots. so i want to turn your attention to that first. you're seeing a lot of blank spots which we saw an aggregate here. seeing a lot of blank spots after the earmarks ban. which is you know consistent with our expectations, you know, given our hypothesis that the earmarks ban is causing had greater dysfunction. you'll also notice that these bills are getting less bipartisan over time. you know, they're passing by narrower and narrower margins. and to be sure, there are some exceptions here so defense, i mean, if you talk to a defense appropriations staffer, you know, they'reup set that they're not always getting over 300 votes to pass their defense appropriations bill. this indicates the privileged position they are used to being in. so you know, the fact that they're passing with a little bit less might be significant for this particular bill. but still, something that people like to vote for. you know, on the flipside, labor h as it's affectionately known on the hill is something that we can expect to have larger problems over time getting passed. this is one of the largest pieces of discretionary spending in the budget. it's got a lot of stuff in it, it's got a lot of social spending in it. it has a lot of health care policy in it which includes contentious issues having to do with abortion. it's not surprising that there process has been difficult for them for longer but i would turn you towards this overall trend. there are a lot of missing years where these bills don't even get brought up for a vote towards the end. and they are less and less bipartisan over time. as you can see. so -- and also another way of looking at some of these votes is that you would typically see you know, appropriators sticking together more often. now you will sometimes even see that cardinals might vote against their own bill on the house floor which is really a very changed turn of events. all right. for my second example of effects of the earmarks ban, there's a changed status, a change power of the appropriations committee. this is -- and this matters for issues of congressional capacity. this matters because you know, historically, this is one of the most competitive committees there are. it used to be called the favor factory. you know, you used to hear appropriators say there are republicans, there are democrats, and then there are appropriators and in addition to being one more way that someone in washington manages to tell you that they are very, very special, see also the view from their personal office and the size of said office, you know, this really does get to a core truth that appropriators have in this special mission that they do often stick together. you know, that they don't -- they did not used to act in as partisan of a manner as others might be expected to. and this is a phrase that you hear less and less often. the 12 subcommittee chairs of the appropriations committee are known as cardinals. this underscores their power. power to run the whole process, but certainly as pertains to earmarks power to give out earmarks to deny earmarks, to get their own earmarks. very, very significant stuff. and certainly if you want to look at the rankings of all committees for both the house and the senate, the appropriations committee is one of the four exclusive committees on the house side. so this is the tip top of desirability for committee placement on the senate side, it has the same top level designation of being a super a committee. these are the committees that people most want to be on. and there are different ways that we can tell that appropriations has become less desirable over time. first of all, you can talk to members and their staff. i've got quotes up there for you. you have also seen some members will even run and try to get on appropriations for the purpose of bringing down the top line spending. you know, flake is a good example of this. you've also seen members of congress actually turn down seats on appropriations or you know, be reported to have turned down seats on appropriations. this is historically unheard of. you know, there was reporting in 2010 that michele bachmann, steve king, lynn westmoreland and jim jordan all turned down seats on the appropriations committee. and the rather amazed journalist said at the time "the difficulty the gop leaders have faced in recruiting appropriations complete members is a stunning reversal from the panel's storied history when members of both parties aggressively competed for committee slots as a way to increase their house influence." you know, this is really quite unusual. i've -- in addition to these more anecdotal examples, i've created an original data set to look at how to measure this. and what i've done is to look at how the examples of freshman member getting on the appropriations committee. this should be something that's very, very difficult to do, this should be something that happens only in very special circumstances. it should be hard to get on this committee. so to have freshmen who are brand-new to congress on the appropriations committee is something really very significant. and you know, to be sure, i'm lifting republican appropriators here. you see this in a far more pronounced fashion with the party that is running on fiscal conservatism, that has tea party strength behind it, and wants to see -- has a view of government that wants to see less spending and less of a role in the economy. so this is more pronounced for them. so that's why they're up there instead of the democrats. the democrats are not with one senate exception which i'll go into in a second are not putting freshmen on appropriations. so we have -- we've got a track record of ever since the earmarks ban having freshmen regularly get on the appropriations committee. and i should highlight that there is a earlier historical exception to this and i'd like to explain that really quickly. there is the 103rd to 105th congresses which were most of which were under the control of speaker gingrich who is notable for adding a number of majority makers to the appropriations committee. he very much wanted to hold control of the chamber and in order to do that, you have to have members in vulnerable districts. you need to have members in the swing districts be your members and he thought that by putting them on an incredibly powerful committee would increase their standing with their voters and protect their seat for both them but also the republican party. so this is a strategy that we see him employing with members who had either flipped seats or were in close seats. that explains all the members that we see here. what we're seeing right now is something different. this is not a, you know, there does not seem to be the same pattern that's going on. and we have -- we have a number of different freshmen in some of these different years. so the 112th congress saw the addition of five freshmen members. you know, we have one in the 113th, we had four in the 114th, and one more in the 115th. so these folks are regularly getting on the committee. and while i do want to highlight that the house is probably the more significant chamber to see this trend, we're seeing the same thing largely in the senate, as well. you know, given the outside's importance of committee seats on the house side as well as the outside importance of the house for the appropriations process. and for senate side, we're also seeing a trend of freshmen members get on to appropriations and i'll quickly explain our exception in the data set over here of the other senate freshmen, you know, a likely explanation for this is that there was an unusually large number of seats to fill that year. the republicans had lost four of their appropriators as well as winning a majority in the senate. and had more seats open on appropriations than other committees. and the democrats have not put any freshmen members on in the house side and from the senate side, there's a single example of this which would be senator chris van hollen, this congress. okay. which brings me to the third effect of the earmarks ban that i want to highlight for everyone today. fewer tools for party leadership. we are in an environment of weak parties while having high partisanship. i'm just going to unpack that for a second. i think that this is something that the earmarks ban helps to drive. members can't deliver goods to their districts and as such, must run on more national politics than local politics. which is helping to drive those trends. but it's also helping to drive those trends because party leaders have fewer tools available to them. now, why should we care about this for our congressional capacity before i get into this chart i have for you? well, this undercuts congressional capacity because party leadership is the strongest organizing principle in congress today. and you know, this is not a situation like the textbook congress of the mid century period where you would have committee chairs filling that vacuum instead of party leadership. so if party leadership is the strongest organizing principle in congress and yet is relatively weak, this has strong implications for congress' ability to act as well as implications for potential turbulence that we might see and have already seen to date. party leadership has actually relatively few tools at their disposal. and i think it's good to contrast earmarks with other major tools here. so just to go through this, for earmarks, this is kind of the sweet spot for a tool of party leadership control. you could have many, many legislative opportunities a year for a single member even within a single bill potentially. this is very useful. they get to go home and credit claim to their constituents and while not literally zero backlash potential, there is virtually none. you know, we've -- of the scandals or quote scandals that i've talked about earlier, you know, we have one bridge to nowhere and we had one duke cunningham. it's while you have thousands upon thousands of earmarks. contrast that with campaign funding. you can use that less frequently just every electoral cycle. the utility of there is low and i would argue that it's lower these days particularly in a post citizens united universe where outside interests are starting to put in a lot more funding. it's hard for the party to keep up. you know, in fact, members will very rightly complain of the demands on their schedule for making fund-raising calls. you know, and not all of them, some of them get so fed up that they go the way of representative jolly but all of them are frustrated with it. it's very difficult to be a member of congress. so there's lower utility for campaign funding and you know, no real backlash potential here. and lastly, you could if you are a party leader trying to corral your copartisans, you could withhold positions of importance whether that's on different committees or in the party leadership structure such as different whips. now, this is problematic because you could use there only very, very rarely. you can use it sparingly and for really extreme cases. it's such a hammer of a tool that it's not always very useful. and it has huge backlash potential. i'm going to give you a few examples of this. i think it's clear how earmarks are more useful to party leaders. so after a speakership election where over 20 of his fellow republicans voted against him for speaker, speaker boehner found that two members of the rules committee had not voted for him for speaker. there is only one person hon puts people on the rules committee. that would be the speaker of the house. these two gentlemen daniel webster and richard nugent both voting for daniel webster found themselves out of a seat on the -- of the rules committee within minutes. very, very quickly. you know, these folks you know, this is a hammer to be used in kind of extreme cases like that. boehner also took tim huelskamp, republican of kansas off the agriculture committee in 2012. hulse camp saw this as leading to his primary loss in 2016. again, something to be used very sparingly. and finally to highlight how this can have very high backlash potential, mark meadows temporarily lost his chair position as on an oversight subcommittee. this is the same gentleman who a couple months later filed a discharge petition against speaker boehner, thus inaugurating a series of events that ended in boehner losing his speakership probably willfully so at that point but you know, had a tremendous amount of backlash, garnered a lot of attention and a lot of people did not see the discharge pardon me, the motion to vacate the chair, excuse me, motion coming. so high backlash potential, no the a really great tool. another way of showing this is just to look at the total number of votes against the party's nominee over time. in this data set, this all comes from crs numbers. i've put together both votes against the democratic party's nominee for speaker as well as the republican nominee for speaker. so those blue bars are a little bit of a mixed bag between ds and rs but we see a pretty markedly increased shift in them after the earmarks ban, you know, at the very end of the 111th at the beginning of the 112 congress we're starting to see an increase in that. so where do we go from here. >> i realize that i've laid out a presentation where i'm seemingly proffering a single factor analysis for a lot of ills that have other causes connected to them. i would argue that the earmarks ban is very significant and if you talk to congressional staff, this is something that you might appreciate more than the average american reading the news. but there are other -- there are other influential factors at play. while i think that you know, having earmarks available changes the incentives for members and as such changes their behavior, it is entirely possible that there are members who do not want earmarks and as such, if offered them, would not change their behavior. the freedom caucus, the house freedom caucus is a good example of this. you also have you know, increased role of money in elections after 2010, as well which coincides with the same time frame. and to be sure, sequestration and conditions of high partisanship are going bedevil this process even if you added earmarks back in. so this would not switch immediately from something very stealthified and aucified legislating practice to something that worked smoothly immediately. and finally the current state of play on earmarks i think is really interesting because you have a number of different republican members who have been asking paul ryan you know can we get a vote on this, can we you know, maybe think about bringing this back. and some folks have said you know, perhaps we can bring this back partially. we can bring this back for you know, army corps of engineer you know projects. but not for everything. some people say hey, let's have some level of transparency. you know, or maybe some limits. another thing that will come out if you talk to staff is just the amount of time vetting earmarks, vetting them if there isn't an earmark ban or if there is an earmark ban to make sure members' requests are not in fact earmarks. so you'll have members and staff emphasizing that. you will also see very certain type of republican would like to see earmarks come back. they happen to sit on the appropriations committee. this is not a big surprise. i think the democrats are far more likely to bring that back. we may see that in the house but you may still have a senate under republican control. so if you're going to be passing appropriations bills, you would have to contend with that. on that note, a lot of things in flux going on on this particular topic right now. il open it up to questions. richard? >> i'm richard from johns hopkins university. to me, there seems to be a fairly obvious partisan divide on earmarks that this was passed as a republican conference rule, the ban on earmarks and that if you look at studies it turns out that earmarks do a lot more for democratic members at home certainly since the democratic members tend to pursue a type of representation that emphasizes things like earmarks, emphasizes serving constituencies at home less than the more ideological path that a lot of republicans take. as you pointed out, people like the house freedom caucus say we wouldn't take ear marks if we could. i'm wondering if that's a factor that maybe you could emphasize more. >> sure. i mean, although i think you put it more starkly than it needs to be particularly with the history of the mid '90s to the mid aughts of republican party control largely and these folks are asking for and getting a lot of earmarks. i do think that you know, the kind of theoretical and em pircally supported differences between kind of interest group democrats and ideological republicans has other ways of measuring that distinction. but given the chance and with a probably a very large exception of house freedom caucus examples, and tea party types, you do see republicans pursuing earmarks. that being said, you have a lot of rhetoric that is very different on the republican side. you also have a lot of groups on the republican side that don't want to see earmarks come back, whether it's different advocacy groups that are specifically anti-earmark or are in favor of fiscal conservativism and define that in such a way to exclude earmarks or different media voices, this is something that they will have to respond to even if they might want to have that back. i mean, if i am a republican party leader, i might want to have my you know, while there already examples of members running for re-election and getting a primary challenge that emphasized their embrace of earmarks and having that be difficult, you know, i think cochran is a good example of that, if i'm a party leader i want to be able to tie a vulnerable member to their district so that you know, the primary challenger that comes from the right has a harder time of it. you know, especially if that person might lose a general election i guess that's less likely in the house but still -- i'm -- you had a multipart question all of which i found interesting. i hope i've answered it. okay, good. you sir in the back. >> hi. i was an earmarks lobbyist and beneficiary for 22 years so i have a bias. did you look at what sort of organizations actually received earmarks historically. >> my experience always was that they're almost all went to non-profits, local government or higher ed. my second question did you look any at authorized earmarks? when you're talking about the bridge to nowhere that was an authorization they then had to do. my experience was a clever recipient would try to get themselves authorized that at propiators didn't have a choice. i haven't had experience with some of my fellow organizations that got themselves created as a small federal program. it was an actual program. >> something i love about the topic of earmarks how many different directions that you can go with it. you've highlighted that really, really well. in terms of what types of earmarks exist, you have you know, i think white makes a distinct between kind of classic earmarks programs, large public works programs, we're talking water projects, we're talking the bridges and kind of new wave after programs funding for academic research. so there's a really a huge span of different types of earmarks if you want to categorize it in terms of who it goes to. and to be sure, you know, defense contractors belong in that conversation, as well. you hinned at ways to get around the ban i believe. i would argue that the earmarks ban is really very effective and that you know, you often see lobbyists such as yourself are increasingly targeting the executive branch which implies that it's really pretty effective. to be sure, you can have -- you'll talk to staffers and they'll say there are things that look like an earmark that if you write it into language carefully enough, you can get it through. i do think that this is relatively rare compared to earlier periods but yes, if you write the rules for something where there's only one provider of this supposedly bob board set of criteria and that one provider happens to be in somebody's district, then it kind of functions as an earmark to be sure. so this is a conversation that i have with folks. or you know, the use of account unfunded requirements list for dod can have that function, as well. anyway, i love all your questions. i want to get down in the weeds on all of them. i hope i've answered them to sufficiently. you sir, and then you next. >> i'm steve liven good with the u.s. capitol historical society. i was waiting under other influential factors for you to discuss the elephant shall we say and donkey in the room. which is the disappearance of the discretionary federal budget in the face of entitlements and even more rising debt service. are you not rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic? >> what is the question here. >> as an other influential factor the fact that earmarking a smaller and smaller amount of discretionary funds is simply rearranging and ignoring the problem which is the disappearance of the discretionary budget, period. >> sure. sure. yeah. the federal budget increasingly looks like a pac-man cartoon with mandatory spending and interest on the debt chomping away at discretionary funding. so to focus on earmarks which you know were never more than half of 1% of the duth can seem misguided to people and you would be numerically legitimate in that point of view if that's how we want to put it. in terms of if you want to focus on the biggest items there are bigger items out there in terms of cutting spending than cutting earmarks. i will go a step further. if we're going to talk about cutting earmarks as a way of getting at deficit reduction and we're -- we've banned earmarks under conditions of sequestration, we're intending up to the cap anyway. so we're not saving any money by banning the ear marks. you're going to spend it anyway. just just taking that money away from other things that you would have spent it on and it becomes an opportunity cost issue. yeah, i mean, there are very important kind of what are the arguments that different sides have for doing there versus not doing this. and you have a lot of you know, concern for deficit reduction that folks like frisch and kelly would push back on saying this actually doesn't do a whole lot for deficit reduction so that's a good point to make. of this gentleman. i'm sorry, i should -- i'm making the microphone lady get exercise. i'm sorry. >> you mentioned earlier that will earmarks be as a collect for executive power. how is the reduction of earmarks influence that situation if you look at national politics as a zero sum game by giving up this power, how has congress given that power out to other groups? >> i mean, i think this is more a statement than a question. i mean, we have different scholars you know white and you know frisch and kelly making an argument that not only is you know legislating and budgeting congress's prerogative but in giving up their ability to earmark they are creeding that power to make those decisions to the executive branch. which gives -- which unilaterally gives up power that is theirs and probably constitutionally has a strong basis for being theirs. you know, those are those arguments. >> is there -- is there like a similar movement on the state level or are earmarks still alive and well in state legislature or. >> that is an excellent question. i do not know the answer to. i'm going to google it. no, i'm kidding. >> yes, i used to work for an agency and was responsible for the agency's budget. and defending its appropriation and its execution, and so while during the period that you were speaking to in the 2003, 2004 time period, as the publicity for an earmarks ban was working up, there were a couple of things that went on as our agency worked with the administration on that. and i guess my first comment is that the administration in its own way lobbied for an earmarks ban, and because they understood the result would give them plor influence over appropriations. and one of the things that they did was they kept changing the definition of earmarks. so that he each year as an agency, we were required to report back to our omb examiners how many earmarks were in the budget first of all and in the appropriations bill. by changing the definition, they could change the number of earmarks we reported that were normally maybe i would say 6% or 7% of our bug, they could drive it up to almost 20% by changing the definition. so my first question is how do you define it? that is when you get the count. then the second question and i understand that can be complicated the way they define it. but the second question is, you didn't show as one of the impacts, you know, you said what are the effects of the ban. and to me, a huge effect was that the -- our budgets i shouldn't say that. at appropriations came very much more closely to the administration's budget. so basically the administration gets its way with the appropriations and as you stated and as the gentleman over here stated i mean the congress just ceded that and i'm just curious in terms of what happens next. it seems like congress just ought to wake up to that fact. i mean, i always keep looking to see what's going to be the straw that tips there back to where congress just gets fed up that they have just totally given up influence over what appropriations. and this is just a comment. my personal opinion was that the congress's appropriation with earmarks was a more balanced appropriation than what the administration budget is. i mean, the administration does use it politically. >> oh, sure. absolutely. and you know, administrations from both parties, too. so -- and you know, adding to your comment that you know, it seems like things were more balanced with earmarks, you have some folks that would also say that if you're able to at least pass these things on the house floor, if you're able to examine these things, if these appropriations bill, if you're able to offer earmarks you get a higher level of congressional scrutiny for the bills than you might otherwise if you're wrapping all of this up into an omnibus bill or you're passing crs to fund continuing resolutions to fund the government. and so there is an aspect of oversight that is contained in all of this, as well. to your two questions on how to define this, so this is our definition from the house rules. i gave you my kind of earmarks in a nutshell, you know, specific pot of money for a specific thing, specific place. asked for by specific member of congress, but there is the more technical language. but your larger question of what's going to change there is politics. you're going to you know, while the majority party remains the majority in these chambers particularly the house, it's unlikely to see change of these rules. i think it's likely that the democrats will do away with this, with the earmarks ban in the house. should they retake the house, this election cycle, the republicans really could hold onto the senate and so we may not end up having -- we may have a difference that makes no difference because they're passing the same appropriations bills. or you have party leaders become convinced that it's in their political interests to start allowing them again. that means that the voices that they're hearing, that means that you know, electoral con testifies that they're seeing start to indicate to them that it's useful again to have these back. which means those voices that they're hear having to change or that voters need to start acting differently. so that's a heb lift given that they're not hearing that right now. >> quick follow-up on how technical this can get. if a project is authorized by congress and let's say it's under construction and the president budgets $5,000 for project a and $10,000 for project b, and the congress just changes that san says the well, we're going to give $10,000 to project a and $5,000 to project b. your definition counts that as two ear mashes. i don't count it an earmark at all. it's an authorized project, it's being appropriated. the members have just changed the number maybe for the better. the point is that's really not an earmark. by that definition, he think it tends to overstate how many true earmarks there are which is where the congress adds something that was never supposed to be in a bill to start with. >> there are a lot of different ways of measuring the impact of earmarks. something that's notable even as their numbers pro live freighli total amount of money going to the earmarks did not proliferate on the same level. there are lots of different ways of measuring things and i get to end on a note of methodology is important which makes me excited as a political scientist. so pay attention to earmarks, folks. [ applause ] >> thank you, laura, very much. you can see we're focused this august on congressional capacity. this is very much if is in very well with that approach. next week, we're going to be looking at congress and the politics of poverty in the u.s. offhand, i can't promise more than what the title says. i'll be really curious what that approach is going to be about. i hope you join us next week. thank you very much, doctor, appreciate it. >> tonight in, on "american history tv," the archival film series "reel america" featuring world war ii films created by the u.s. army signal corps under the supervision of frank capra. the films were designed to show the causes of the conflict to u.s. troops. the first film in the why we fight series was prelude to war which covers the outbreak of world war ii to the pearl harbor attack and explores the rise of authoritarianism in many germany, italy and japan begins at 8:00 p.m. eastern. >> this weekend, on "american history tv" on c-span3, saturday at 10:00 p.m. eastern on reel america." >> we are privileged to witness tonight a significant achievement in the cause of peace. and achievement none thought possible a year ago. or even a month ago. an achievement that reflects the courage and wisdom of these two leaders. >> the 1978 film "framework for peace," on the camp david peace accords. and sunday, at 6:00 p.m. on american artifacts, a look back on the 1998 bombings of the u.s. embassies in nairobi, kenya and daraa salaam, tanzania. >> we were meeting with the minister of commerce. we heard an explosion. most of lus went to the window, ten seconds later, a freight train sounding impact of high energy hit all of us. 213 people were instantly killed. 48 of whom were employees of the united states government. >> watch on "american history tv" this weekend on c-span3. >> this weekend on book tv, saturday, at 4:15 p.m. eastern, bob booed ward's interview on his flu book "fear trump in the white house." >> somebody in a key position after the book came out who is in office now called me and said, everyone knows what you have in this book. is 1,000% correct. >> then at 9:00 p.m. eastern former independent counsel ken starr discusses his book "contempt, a memoir of the clinton investigation." >> what i'm saying there in the, about, the clinton experience is, we learned from our history as a free people and impeachment was not the wise way to go. >> and on sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on after words, former secretary of state john kerry discusses his book "every day is extra." he's interviewed by former congresswoman and president and ceo of the wilson center jane harman. >> john and i were try frying to kuwait on an airplane. we didn't know each other very well at all but we were seated opposite of each other by sen yart which is what happens in the senate. it worked because it brought us together. we had a conversation into the night talking about annapolis and his father and grandparents, his family and his own service and his time as a prisoner. and he wanted to learn more about what happened with us and how we fought and what it was like and so forth. and we pledged to each other right then that that the country c was still divided over the war that we thought we needed to find a way not to just make peace with vietnam but at home. >> watch this weekend on c-sp 2 c-span2's book tv. >> senate judiciary committee chair chuck grassley has called a hearing for monday to give supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh along with professor christine blasey ford a chance to testify. professor ford accused the judge of sexually assaulting her into high school. while she has not agreed to testify on monday, her lawyer says she is willing to testify sometime next week under certain conditions. we plan live coverage of monday's session on c-span scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m. eastern, also available at c-span.org and you can listen with the free cl span radio app. we'll also be live for any further meetings of the judiciary committee. >> next, a discussion before a senate health subcommittee on financial literacy and retirement savings. topics included efforts to increase retirement savings among

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