Both the earmark ban and the new debt ceiling keep Senate Republicans on track with the tea party’s stance on spending, diverging from a majority of House Republicans who voted in a secret ballot to support Democrats’ return to earmarking, with additional crash barriers. Still, neither the earmarking ban nor the language of the debt ceiling is binding – meaning that nothing will prevent individual senators from asking for eartags or voting to raise the debt ceiling without corresponding cuts.
Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) called the language of the debt ceiling “ambitious”. And Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) was one of the Republicans who said they will request ear tags as part of the spending process.
The new focus on fiscal conservatism follows years of Republican support for tax increases to reduce deficits, increased Pentagon budgets and billions of dollars for a southern border wall touted by Trump. With President Joe Biden in the White House, a number of Republicans have returned to taking care of the federal debt, unwilling to support the President’s infrastructure proposal of more than $ 2 trillion and instead a smaller package totaling $ 600 billion to $ 800 billion to float.
“We live in fiscally irresponsible times and both parties are equally guilty,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) After the internal discussion on Wednesday.
With Democrats bringing back earmarks no matter what the GOP does, the choice to keep the ban probably won’t affect the behavior of individual senators as there are no set rules preventing them from earmarking – ban or no ban. A number of Senate Republicans are already planning to propose earmarks, notably top developers who oversee spending on one-third of the federal budget, such as Sens. Richard Shelby from Alabama and Shelley Moore Capito from West Virginia.
“People who want to apply for eartags can eventually do that, and people who don’t will not,” Cornyn said.
Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Who successfully fought in 2019 to make the conference’s earmark ban permanent, said he believed anti-earmarking Republicans would “likely” fall short in their effort to enforce the ban, up to a few days. ago. The party’s slowness changed as they increasingly discussed the matter internally, he said.
About a third of the Senate’s 50 Republicans were undecided and “drifted” back to supporting earmarks before opponents sharpen their arguments, Sasse explained. And Russ Vought, who served as White House budget director under Trump, spoke to Republicans at lunch Wednesday to persuade them to uphold the earmark ban.
‘You have to be concerned about tax responsibility whether you participate [or] “out of power,” Sasse said in an interview on Wednesday. If it’s not a core tenet of both parties, it’s something the Republicans should use to refine our argument about what we stand for. And I think most people at our conference eventually get that. But it just took a lot of conversations to focus on them. “
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.