Speaking of perspective — and flip-flops — what a metamorphosis we’ve seen from Marco Rubio on “earmarks.” When he was Florida House speaker — all of two years ago — he made sure he got his share for the South Florida voters back home, even if others disparagingly called them “turkeys.”
But on the U.S. senate campaign hustings, with an early Tea Party tailwind, he got anti-“earmarks” religion and spoke on behalf of banning them. They are “bad for our country,” declaimed Rubio, as if channeling Jim DeMint.
Now comes the governing part. Abusive “pork” is, indeed, bad for the country. But most earmarks are not “bridges to nowhere.” Many are legitimate, priority projects. The real challenge and charge for Rubio & Co. is to cull parochial abuses by acting the part of true reformers with a conscience, a budget scalpel and a mandate to do something other than traffic in home-state largesse and anti-government rhetoric.
And this just in. “Earmark” savings are mostly symbolic in trillion-dollar budgets and deficits. But in the absence of congressional input, spending decisions impacting states will still be made. But they would revert to the executive branch, which presumably wouldn’t know states’ legitimate priorities the way legislators would.
Is that what taxpayers would prefer? The demonized, distant executive branch making key calls instead of legislators with enough guts and state-need savvy to separate priorities from pork?