BRINGING EARMARKS BACK WON'T FIX CONGRESS

ELIMINATING EARMARKS DIDN’T MAKE THE GOVERNMENT SMALLER. BUT REINSTATING THEM WOULD FACILITATE LEGISLATIVE CORRUPTION.

- ERIC BOEHM

BEFORE THE “BRIDGE to Nowhere” became a legislative cliché, there was the highway to Dennis Hastert’s farm.

Hastert was speaker of the House in 2005 when he secured a $207 million earmark, tucked into a $244 billion transportation funding package, to build the so-called “Prairie Parkway”—a proposed 33-mile highway through the exurbs west of Chicago that was ostensibly meant to connect two interstates. Hastert promised that it would ease traffic flows, and President George W. Bush described it as “crucial” for the fast-growing region’s economic fortunes when he signed the massive transportation bill into law during a visit to the area.

But there was another crucial quality to the Prairie Parkway. Plans called for it to pass within a few miles of nearly 300 acres of land that Hastert, his wife, and some business partners had purchased two years earlier. The tract had no easy access to roads when Hastert bought it, but as one of the most powerful politicians in the country, he was well-positioned to change that. A few months after the earmark was approved, Hastert and his partners sold their suddenly more-valuable land to a developer and pocketed millions of dollars in profit.