News-Record.com

Republican leaders Skip Stam (of the House) and Phil Berger (of the Senate) held their weekly news conference, this week focusing on earmarks. Check that, they were really focusing on all proposed spending increases in the budget.

(You can click here to listen to the full presser.)

Here's why I say this wasn't really an earmark newser:

They presented a list of Senators and a total amount by their name. They only attributed funding to the Senator if they were the primary sponsor on the list and it didn't matter if the spending was a departmental request, salary bump, or local project.

(Click here for the news release and list they handed out.)

So, if we take the person at the top of their list, state Sen. Katie Dorsett, a Democrat, gets tagged with a $617,511,720 total. But the bulk of that - to the tune of $500,000 or so - is a request for employee and teacher pay raises.

If you think about earmarks in the classic federal sense, such as the ones detailed in this post, salary increases wouldn't qualify. Earmarks are traditionally thought of as pork and/or spending that would benefit a legislator's home area. Pay raises would be a benefit across the state.

That said, the larger point that Senators had requested $2 billion in spending increases is well taken. However, it's worth noting that the majority of that spending probably won't make it in the final version of the bill.

I asked Stam if he knew what the comparison was between the amount of new spending requested by the House and what made the final cut. He quipped:

"The Democrats this year in the House were constrained by the lack of money. But if get next year to a situation where the economy is doing better, they're instinctively, perhaps genetically, inclined to spend whatever money is there, where as Republicans will look more at priorities and only spend what is necessary."

He added, "I was kidding about the genetic part."

There was a second part to the Republicans thesis here. Not only were Democrats requesting a lot of spending, but it is sometimes hard to track exactly how some items get in the budget.

Now, the very fact that Republicans can file a spending request list shows there is some transparency. But, as Berger notes, there will be some items that show up that are never debated of filed under a bill and no one will be able to tell how they got there, at least not by way of a paper trail. And the budget process is run by the Democratic leadership in such a way that it produces the result they want. Of course, you could make an argument that doing that sort of thing is one of the spoils of power.

At any rate, here's a video slice of Berger talking about that point for those who don't want to wade through the audio posted up above: