Mobile’s congressman drew an unflattering mention from one of Washington’s most widely read political columnists in mid-March 2008, when Bob Novak used his nationally syndicated column in The Washington Post to question whether Rep. Jo Bonner was the right pick to help lead earmark reform on the House Appropriations Committee.
Novak’s column, published March 11, took aim at House Republican Leader John Boehner for the way he filled a vacancy on the powerful committee. Unlike Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Boehner does not request earmarks himself and has criticized the practice publicly. But according to Novak, Boehner passed up a chance to make a bolder statement at the start of the session, when he could have pushed the House Republican Conference to adopt a yearlong earmark moratorium and installed Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, one of the chamber’s most consistent earmark opponents, in the open Appropriations seat.
Instead, Republicans chose Bonner, a Mobile-area Republican who spent 18 years as a House staffer before winning his own seat in 2002. Novak noted that Bonner has voted against Flake’s earmark-elimination amendments in 49 of 50 attempts, and that Bonner has told his constituents he would work to get them “fair value” for their tax dollars, the same rationale lawmakers have long used to justify bringing federal earmarks home to their districts. Novak wrote that Boehner nonetheless hailed Bonner’s selection as a step toward earmark reform, a characterization the columnist clearly viewed with skepticism.
The episode is the latest example of the national scrutiny Bonner has drawn since conservatives pushed for his appointment to the Appropriations Committee as part of a broader earmark-reform push within the House GOP. Whether that criticism is entirely fair is another question. Bonner is unlikely to match Flake’s hawkishness on spending cuts, but he is also a different kind of appropriator than Rep. John Murtha, the committee’s Democratic chairman and one of the House’s most prolific earmarkers, or even Alabama’s senior senator, Richard Shelby, who has never shied from using earmarks to direct federal money to Alabama projects.
For Mobile-area readers, the column is a reminder that a hometown congressman’s committee assignments and voting record can draw national attention well beyond the district, particularly during a period when earmark spending had become one of the most contentious issues in Washington. How Bonner balances that national profile against the expectation, voiced by his own constituents, that he will continue delivering federal money to South Alabama projects is likely to remain a point of scrutiny as the earmark-reform debate continues.