House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has called on Republicans to let Democrats take the first step on earmarks. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo Congress House GOP leaders dodge final-hour earmarks fight

House Republicans have agreed to punt on one of the most troublesome political issues of their eight-year majority: earmarks.

GOP lawmakers and aides say House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who will become the chamber's No. 1 Republican in January, has been privately cautioning his ranks against moving to end the ban on earmarks in their final weeks in charge. Instead, the thinking goes, the GOP should let Democrats take the first step — and face all the backlash.


“He’s made it very clear we want to wait and see what Democrats do. And I think it’s the right call,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a longtime appropriator, told POLITICO. “Let the new party wrestle with whether they want to do that. The first move is theirs on this issue now.”

At a closed-door meeting last week, at least one GOP lawmaker, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), was widely expected to introduce a proposal to undo the conference’s 2011 moratorium on earmarks, as he has a history of doing during the biennial GOP meeting on conference rules. But restoring the practice of directing spending toward specific projects never came up, according to multiple people in the room.

Neither Rogers nor McCarthy’s offices returned requests for comment.

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The decision to avert a politically treacherous debate on earmarks was largely unanimous among the House GOP Conference, despite the fact that many Republican lawmakers, particularly appropriators, actually embrace the idea.

“We certainly weren’t going to make that the last thing Republicans do,” Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), newly elected vice chairman of the Republican Conference, said in an interview.

Even if the proposal had been offered during the GOP meeting, it was not expected to be adopted, according to one senior Republican aide. “I think most members would want to wait for [Democrats] to bite the bullet first," the aide said.

In January, House Democrats are expected to do just that by taking up the issue when the conference meets to establish its own rules. If that vote is successful, it will be just the first step in a lengthy process that would require making deals with both the Senate and the White House to ensure no subsequent spending bills sink due to the House's move.

Democratic leaders have not laid out a specific path. Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), who is expected to become chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said she has "no idea" what will come of calls for restoring what she describes as “congressionally directed spending.”

“But if there is bipartisan consensus, it’s in Article I, and we have a right to have them. And if there’s bipartisan support, they can come back,” Lowey said, adding that congressional leaders could revisit a 2008 disclosure deal intended to end the practice of secretive earmarks by requiring lawmakers to attach their names to proposals for pet projects.

“We’d have to review [the rules] again and make sure they’re acceptable to both sides and there’s absolute openness and a process that works,” Lowey said.

Last year, when a group of House Republicans last attempted to bring back earmarks, it was just weeks after President Donald Trump had been elected with his “drain the swamp” rallying cry. Going against the wishes of a majority of the GOP caucus, House Speaker Paul Ryan moved to halt the debate to avoid a public relations nightmare.

Ryan and other Republican leaders did take some steps this year to restart the debate, after Trump suggested congressional leaders "start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks" to rekindle a "friendliness" among legislators.

This summer, the House Rules Committee held its first set of hearings on the issue of earmarks in years. But public discussion of reviving spending on pet projects ceased as House Republicans appeared on track to lose their majority.

Now, GOP legislators are eager for the new Democratic leadership to wade into those muddy waters on their watch.

“We anticipate the Democrats bringing it back. At that point, we’ll make a decision what our conference rules will be,” Walker said.

Conservative groups like Heritage Action, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks have long derided the practice as pork barrel spending, which developed a toxic reputation after a series of scandals that led to prison time for a lawmaker in 2005.

“Earmarks are the currency of the swamp that Republicans were elected to drain in 2016," FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon wrote as a warning to House Republicans before last week's meeting. "Many were not re-elected in 2018 because they failed to drain the swamp."

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.