

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) lost reelection in a runoff Saturday. (Photo by Rex C. Curry/For The Washington Post)

Sen. Mary Landrieu's defeat in a Louisiana run-off doesn't just mark the demise of the Southern white, conservative Democrat. It's also the coda to a few decades of pork-barrel politics -- the congressional practice of deal making and horse trading whereby members, until recently, traded votes for a few million here and there to fund special projects around their districts with the goal of appeasing donors and voters.

Landrieu never shied away from pork-barrel politics. Right up to the end, she made the case to voters that they should keep her in office because she could bring home the bacon. Byron York catalogued dozens of press releases from her office boasting about all the federal spending she'd brought home. With control of the Senate decided in Republicans' favor, she argued, voters should look out for Louisiana. When it came to protecting the state's interests, she told her supporters, she was the New Orleans Saints' Drew Brees and her opponent was a rookie nobody's heard of.

"You've got someone that's on the field, playing well, delivering for the state, putting Louisiana first," she told WVLA.

Despite the argument though, we've now got a change in the lineup. Rookie Bill Cassidy will switch from Louisiana's 6th congressional district to take over Landrieu's slot.

Maybe the new ban on earmarks in the House, imposed by Republicans when they won the chamber in 2010, prevented Landrieu from getting enough pork through Congress to hold onto her seat. It was a strategy that many lawmakers felt worked for them before, but as this chart from the ever-vigilant Citizens Against Government Waste shows, pork-barrel spending is now almost entirely a thing of the past.

Maybe voters, disgusted by what they see as the excesses of a previous era, have soured on pork-barrel spending. Cassidy's aides think the Republican's victory is a sign that politics has entered a "post-pork paradigm," one of them told York.

One implication of this new paradigm is that compromise in Washington has become even more difficult, as Matt Yglesias has written. Without pork, there will be fewer centrist lawmakers like Landrieu holding onto seats in the other party's territory. The leadership, which relied on pork to cajole the more stubborn members of their caucuses into voting for major bills, will have an even harder time shepherding important legislation through Congress.

"The judicious application of lard emerged over the years as a time-honored means of greasing the wheels of government," Yglesias writes. And while the earmarks often looked wasteful, they were never outrageously expensive. As the chart above shows, pork-barrel spending reached its highest-ever level in 2006. Pork totaled $29 billion that year, or about 1.1 percent of total federal expenditures.

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What's in Wonkbook: 1) Guidance on the use of force 2) Opinions, including Douthat, Max Fisher and Chris Hughes on The New Republic 3) Greeks ask for end to U-Va. suspension 4) Economy adds 321,000 jobs 5) Demographics threaten U.S. forests, and more

Number of the day: 3,600. That's the altitude, in miles, that NASA spacecraft Orion reached before returning to earth on its test flight Friday morning, splashing down precisely on target in the Pacific Ocean west of California. It's the highest any spacecraft has flown in decades. James Dean in USA Today.

Chart of the day:

During periods when income is distributed less equally, the poor are even less likely to marry than the rich. That's been the case since the first Gilded Age, suggesting that the reluctance to marry among the poor isn't a result of dependence on government welfare or a decline in values. Andrew J. Cherlin in The New York Times.

1. Policy will permit racial profiling at the border



New guidelines for federal law enforcement will allow border agents to consider race. After a lengthy negotiation between Attorney General Eric Holder, the White House and Secretary Jeh Johnson, the guidelines will not govern the Department of Homeland Security. Ethnicity and race are crucial factors for agents patrolling the border, the administration concluded. The guidelines will be announced in the coming days. Sari Horwitz and Jerry Markon in The Washington Post.

The exception for border agents is a major one. "Federal agents have jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the borders, including the coastlines, an area that includes roughly a third of the United States, and nearly two-thirds of its population. Federal agents board buses and Amtrak trains in upstate New York, questioning passengers about their citizenship and detaining people who cannot produce immigration papers. Border Patrol agents also run inland checkpoints looking for illegal immigrants." Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt in The New York Times.

Racial profiling can be counterproductive. As Attorney General John Ashcroft noted in 2003, research shows that when law enforcement use race to make judgments, they waste their time on innocent people rather than focusing on real indicators of dangerous behavior. Emily Badger in The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, demonstrations for Mike Brown and Eric Garner have become more organized. Protests were held in cities from Boston to the Bay Area, blocking traffic and invading retailers, and they're getting responses. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would consider legislation requiring special prosecutors in police shootings and body cameras for officers. Laura Meckler and Thomas MacMillan in The Wall Street Journal.

SOMIN: Conservatives must oppose racial profiling. The argument against racial profiling is the same as the argument against affirmative action. Just because you don't know everything there is to know doesn't mean you can use race to fill in the gaps. The Washington Post.

2. Top opinions

SUMMERS: Both the private and the public sectors are to blame for our rickety infrastructure. The country must focus on routine but crucial tasks like repairing elevators and bridges before bolder ones like high-speed trains, and understand that poor maintenance is always costly. The Washington Post.

DIONNE: Base government policy on empirical evidence. New bipartisan legislation would create a task force to find ways of rigorously evaluating federal programs and tax expenditures against their stated goals. The Washington Post.

The best treatment for AIDS is a living wage. The psychological toll of poverty makes people more susceptible to developing the disease and encourages the risky behavior that allows the virus to spread. Alejandro Varela in The New Republic.

DOUTHAT: Changes at The New Republic represent the end of the broad-minded publication. Magazines like The New Republic used to print cultural and literacy criticism along with the news, which gave their readers a respect for history and a useful perspective on the political fads of the moment. The New York Times.

CHRIS HUGHES: Journalism's a business, man. "At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how The New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a 'public trust' and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity... We owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business and not position ourselves to rely on the largesse of an unpredictable few." The Washington Post.

"Interesting/weird choice by @ChrisHughes to put this in the WashPost rather than ..... @tnr " -- @ggreenwald

MAX FISHER: Where were was The New Republic's spine when it was owned by Marty Peretz? At least Hughes isn't racist. The previous owner's offensive columns never elicited the same kind of reaction from commentators as Hughes' decisions have. Vox.

Dynamic scoring introduces uncertainty into the budget process. The CBO's measures already account for some changes in Americans' behavior in response to revisions in the tax code, but there's no reliable way of measuring the total macroeconomic effect that federal policy will have. All dynamic scoring produces is an uninformative range of estimates. The New York Times.

3. Fraternities call for end to suspension at U-Va.

National Greek organizations want the school to reinstate fraternities and sororities on campus. Their request follows Rolling Stone's acknowledgement of "discrepancies" in a controversial article on rape. Nick Anderson in The Washington Post.

Students at U-Va. think the school has a serious problem. "What does it say that we read an article in which an 18-year-old girl was pinned down, graphically violated by multiple people in a house we pass almost every day — and we thought, 'That just may be right?' " Julia Horowitz at Politico.

TAUB: Protecting victims means fact-checking their stories. "I was a lawyer before becoming a journalist, and I worked with refugees and other trauma victims. That taught me that it is incredibly difficult for traumatized people to tell an accurate story, even if they are trying to do so." Vox.

WEMPLE: Rolling Stone digs itself deeper. An updated note from the magazine's editors acknowledge the publication's failings, which are colossal and damaging. The Washington Post.

Crazy talent interlude: The very young Grace Mitchell is from Portland, Ore. Here's her "Your Design."

4. Economy crushes it in November

With 321,000 new jobs last month, the labor market is returning to strength. "The latest numbers came with nascent signs of wage growth, the result of qualified individuals reentering the workforce, putting pressure on companies to retain their best employees or bid for new applicants." Chico Harlan in The Washington Post.

"Wow, 321k beats the consensus expectation outside the 90% C.I., that can't happen that often." -- @squarelyrooted

But America still needs a raise. Given improvements in productivity, wages should be increasing by around 4 percent a year. For some reason, they're not. Matt O'Brien in The Washington Post.

YGLESIAS: It's too early to celebrate. The report contains all kinds of good news, and cheaper oil next year will help the economy, too. That said, there have been a few false dawns in the past six years. Vox.

KRUGMAN: Don't blame Obama for the sluggish recovery. The stimulus was inadequate, and more aggressive spending by Congress would have brought the economy to this point sooner. The New York Times.

5. In case you missed it

President Bush and his aides stand by the torture program. In a cable interview Sunday, the former president defended the CIA's practices. A Senate report on the program is expected to be released this week. Peter Baker in The New York Times.

Demographics endanger U.S. forests. More than half of the nation's 766 million acres of forest are privately owned, and the average age of the owners is 62.5. As older owners sell their land, forestry experts worry the new proprietors of smaller lots won't have the same commitment to ecological management. Wilson Ring for the Associated Press.