Pence has not only admitted that fact, but he also blamed out-of-control earmarking by Republicans as one factor in their loss of the majority in 2006. Pence also has confessed to seeking earmarks every session he’s been in Congress. But he said he’s never traded a vote for an earmark, a common if unseemly practice, and he was among the first to post every appropriations request he makes on his Web site for all to see.

Which gets to the crux of what’s wrong with earmarks. The mere act of spending money on a project is not pernicious. The House of Representatives’ constitutional job is to appropriate money, and there’s no way every taxpayer will benefit from every expenditure.The problem is the way in which so many earmarks are placed secretively and at the last minute into 3,000-page budget bills during conference committee negotiations without public input.

As Pence wrote in the Feb. 5 Washington Times about last year’s omnibus
spending bill:

“Members did not have time to review it. If they had, they would
have found that it contained wasteful earmark spending ranging from funding fruit fly research to building swimming pools to providing for wine and culinary centers. Most egregious, they would have found that nearly 300 unexamined earmarks costing more than $800 million were dropped in at the last minute, in the middle of the night, immune to public debate or scrutiny until after the fact.”

This is the kind of conduct that disgusts taxpayers to the point of rebellion. It’s a modern form of taxation without representation, and it’s got to stop. Yet the House wouldn’t even agree to a temporary hold on earmarks pending a study, and those who did were accused of being hypocrites. Pence is right when he says it’s time for a fundamental overhaul.

Other conservatives agree with Flake that the Conference should take a bolder stand on the issue now that McCain is the presumptive nominee.

“House Republicans would do well to embrace a Republican-only moratorium and give the American people a choice this fall,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), noting McCain’s emergence.