Alexander Martin Speaks on Pork

“My experience as a politician, as State senator from North Carolina, governor and US senator from that state makes me familiar with the ways of politics.  And I overcame many setbacks, including that unfortunate incident during the War when I was courts martialed for cowardice and acquitted, through my political acumen.  I fully support politicians doing their all to support their constituents.  However, I do not support the concept of my State paying many times over for other’s pet projects just so we can have a few of our own.

“Many important bills in the early Congresses were only a few pages long, today important legislation often runs into the thousands of pages.  Why is this?  If we were to let today’s Congress assemble the Constitution, rather than the ~7500 words in the amended document, or the ~4500 words in the document we prepared, we would likely see thousands of pages designed to cover and protect every interest in the US.   

When we originally framed the Constitution we spent a lot of effort to distill the Constitution to the essence of what we believed was needed.  No such effort is made in legislation today.  Rather, important legislation is loaded with (often unrelated) items considered important to only small minorities of the Congress because this is the only opportunity to get those items funded.  The added costs of these items, while small individually, is a substantial portion of legislation, totaling over $15B in 2010.

“In the past a ‘line item veto’ has been proposed to deal with some of this problem.  With a ‘line item veto’ the President would be able to individually veto any item within a piece of legislation.  Giving the President such power not only fails to solve the problem but also assures an unbalance of power toward the President’s party since items favored by that party would not be vetoed while those opposed would be vetoed.

“Members of Congress can currently claim that while they opposed some line items in a Bill, they voted for the package as a whole because it was important to their constituents.  Thus they abrogate any responsibility for unnecessary components of legislation with their constituents.  As a result, each citizen pays for many items which probably should have been funded by someone else’s State or Local government.  We did not intend for the Federal government to become the funding source for such items.

“This seems to be one of those areas where the incentives in the system lead to undesirable behavior.  First, members of Congress are incentivized to tack items important to their constituents onto any Bill they believe will likely pass and will obscure their item with the many other and costlier items included.  Second, members of Congress are incentivized to allow other members to include such items because they thus garner support for their similar items and can still deny responsibility for the items not desired by their constituents.  The proper incentive would be for every member of Congress to ruthlessly seek out and destroy every item which is not essential to the Bill.

“One way to achieve such an incentive is to make each member of Congress personally responsible for his/her vote on each and every item in the legislation.  This could be achieved by allowing any member to call for a separate vote on any individual line item.  Opponents of this approach would argue that it would slow the passage of legislation tremendously (although some would argue that this is good.)  But, consider the second order effects.  Unrelated and local items would likely not ever make it into the Bill because the advocates could not stand the visibility they might get.  Bills would likely have many fewer line items thus reducing Congressional micromanagement and increasing the latitude of the executing agencies.  Congressional staffs could be reduced or focused on more important items because there would be fewer obscure items to investigate.”