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push their partisan agenda through, while the minority works diligently to stymie such
efforts. Scholars of congressional organization, though, offer a very different picture: a
more decentralized legislature with relatively weak parties, where members seek seats on
committees that have jurisdiction over the portion of the budget they believe is most
important to the localities they represent.14 Members then engage in a positive-sum
game: they use their committee positions to appropriate funds for projects that benefit a
particular interest or visibly bring federal resources into their district or state, and then
trade votes in order to secure funding for their pet projects.15
By catering in this manner to diverse—and sometimes deserving—special interests,
members create powerful allies and potential campaign contributors, which provide them
with financial and organizational advantages in subsequent elections. Given the electoral
benefits of this distributive brand of politics, it is little surprise that pork-barrel projects, in
the form of “earmarks” attached to appropriations bills, are both quite common and on the
rise. According to the Congressional Research Service, in 1994 members of Congress
allocated $27 billion on 4,202 pet projects; in 2005, they set aside $52.1 billion for
16,050 such projects.16
The 2006 election season was roiled by unfolding news about the outsized influence that
lobbyist Jack Abramoff seemed to have on the work of Congress and the practice of
earmarking. (Abramoff, Representative Robert Ney of Ohio, and at least 10 others have
since been convicted of criminal charges in this context.17) In an effort to increase the
transparency of these spending decisions and decrease the influence of hired lobbyists on
Washington lawmakers, the Congress elected that year passed an ethics reform bill entitled
the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. The new law prohibits
members of Congress and their staffs from accepting gifts, free meals, and travel, and
extends the time a former member must wait before becoming a lobbyist. In addition, the
bill requires the disclosure of, among other things, the legislative author of all earmarks for
federal projects in appropriations bills, and an accounting of any earmarks contained in
bills and conference reports before they are voted on. Critics of the legislation point out
that while it does restrict the use of earmarks, it also creates a number of loopholes, for
instance by increasing—from one or two to 40—the number of senators it takes to
prevent provisions not passed by the House or the Senate from being inserted into
legislation. That would make it easier, not harder, to enact special interest measures
without public scrutiny.18
While earmarks have been popularly described as a means for lawmakers to divert
taxpayer dollars into wasteful pork-barrel projects of limited public utility, some elected
officials have spoken up in favor of the practice. Democratic Representative Rahm Emanuel
of Illinois, for instance, noted that while “some members of Congress, on both sides of the
aisle, eschew earmarks…most members believe it is their prerogative and their duty to
channel federal resources to important public purposes.”19
Nearly every president in the past century has sought to obtain the authority of a line-item
veto as a tool for controlling supposedly wasteful spending added to bills by lawmakers.
Most governors have similar authority over state spending. In a curious triangulation,
Democratic President Bill Clinton collaborated with congressional Republicans to enact the
Line Item Veto Act of 1996, and Clinton used the new power 82 times before it was
declared unconstitutional in a 6-to-3 ruling by the Supreme Court in 1998.20
Constituency service and district ties. Constituency service is another means by which
members of Congress can improve their image within their districts and create an electoral

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