If elected president, Sen. John McCain has vowed to do what no previous commander in chief has done: root out all Congressional earmarks from the federal budget. That stand might have helped him lock up the nomination today, as his closest rival, Mitt Romney, reportedly planned to end his campaign. But it hasn’t always won Mr. McCain friends among his Senate colleagues.
The Arizona senator has pledged to veto spending bills that contain earmarks, to control what he sees as runaway federal spending. That could shut down the billions of dollars in the noncompetitive grants that have flown to colleges and universities in recent years.
Senator McCain recently surged ahead in the GOP race partly by using the earmark issue to burnish his credentials as a fiscal conservative, at a time when he is under intense fire from some fellow Republicans who view him as a liberal. In speeches on the Senate floor over the years, Mr. McCain has frequently waved long lists of earmarks that he considers wasteful, even frivolous. (He would cut the noncompetitive, directed grants more deeply than would President Bush, who implored Congress last month to halve their number and cost in the 2009 fiscal year.)
Despite Senator McCain’s tough talk, previous presidents who have vowed to get tough on pork-barrel spending have backed down after encountering sharp opposition among lawmakers, who jealously defend the pet projects that their earmarks finance and Congress’s power over federal pursestrings. He just might find himself, in the words of another earmark critic and fellow Arizonan, U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake, “beaten like a rented mule.”
Mr. McCain’s absolutist stance on earmarks reportedly brought him the enmity of at least one powerful colleague, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi. As the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Mr. Cochran has strongly supported earmarks for his home state — a record that has helped elevate its universities repeatedly to the top of the list of all colleges in receipt of earmarked funds.
Senator Cochran told The Boston Globe in January that he was endorsing Mr. Romney, and mentioned that the thought of Senator McCain as president “sends a cold chill down my spine” because he is “erratic” and “hot-headed.”
Mr. Cochran’s remarks were uncharacteristic. “During 35 years in Congress, the soft-spoken, gentlemanly Cochran seldom has uttered a harsh word about anybody,” wrote Robert D. Novak, the conservative columnist, in today’s Washington Post. Senator Cochran’s opposition stemmed not from differences over ideology, Mr. Novak reported, but specifically Senator McCain’s crusade against earmarks.
