By Mark K. Matthews and Jason Garcia
WASHINGTON — It's been a couple of years since Congress banned lawmakers from "earmarking" federal money to pay for pet projects, but the specter of the once-popular practice still hangs over the campaign trail.
Nowhere in Florida is that more evident than in the fierce Republican primary between U.S. Rep. Sandy Adams of Orlando and U.S. Rep. John Mica of Winter Park for the redrawn Seminole County-based Seventh Congressional District.
A congressional freshman waging an uphill campaign against a 20-year veteran, Adams has seized on Mica's long history of using so-called earmarks to fund local projects, which she blames as one cause of the country's enormous debt. She has called for a permanent ban on earmark spending in Congress and challenged Mica to do the same.
It's a crucial plank in Adams' strategy to appeal to voters who identify with the tea-party movement and other fiscal conservatives, important voting blocs in GOP primaries. They cite outrages ranging from a $223 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska to $15,000 for Florida Atlantic University to study how alcohol affects a mouse's motor function.
"John Mica and other big-spending career politicians are part of the problem in Washington, D.C.," Adams recently wrote to supporters in a fundraising email.
That Mica has been a longtime defender — and user — of earmarks is without question.
Between 2008 and 2010, when a series of scandals forced Congress to make earmark requests public, Mica won approval of more than 40 projects worth about $30 million, from bus stops to multimillion-dollar defense contracts, according to a database of appropriations bills tallied by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.
And that is only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of earmark requests — not all of which became law — that Mica has boasted about in news releases dating back to 1997.
Indeed, Mica in 2008 said there was "no way in hell" he would support an earmark ban because it would cede too much of Congress' power to unelected bureaucrats. He since has softened that stance and backs a temporary ban that Congress enacted for this session — though he is unapologetic.
"When we had them, mine were always properly vetted," said Mica, pointing to his own efforts in 2007 to bring transparency to project requests from the House transportation committee, which he now chairs.
"My record speaks for itself," he said.
Taken together, Mica's record makes him a ripe target for Adams. But the offensive has also left her open for a counterattack.
"People who live in glass houses should not throw stones," Mica said.
That's because Adams herself has a history of earmark spending during her time in the Florida Legislature, where she served from 2002 until 2010.
Before she arrived in Congress and made cutting federal spending a signature issue, Adams sought $129.5 million worth of earmarks in Tallahassee, according to legislative records. Her requests ranged from $500,000 to weatherize low-income homes in Oviedo to $650,000 for a phosphate-research group to demonstrate the value of using a phosphate-processing byproduct as a cover to extend the life of landfills.
Though that's a modest amount compared with what Mica has sought in Congress, the difference is as much pragmatic as it is philosophical: State legislators have far less money to spend than their federal counterparts, and Adams never gained the same level of clout in Tallahassee that Mica — as chair of the House transportation committee — has in Washington.
The people whom Adams worked with were grateful for her support. She was "instrumental" in winning a $100,000 earmark to support a forensic recovery enhancement team in Seminole County, said Jim Berko, the chief executive officer of Seminole Community Health, the nonprofit that received the grant.
Adams says there is no comparison between her work in Tallahassee and earmarking in Congress, which accounted for about $15.9 billion in federal spending in 2010.
Only a fraction of her requests — approximately $18 million worth — made it into the final state budgets. And some of those were subsequently vetoed by then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist, who, unlike the president of the United States, have the power to strike individual line items from the Legislature's budget.
"There is an extreme difference between the two," Adams said, calling Florida's budget process more transparent than Washington's, where earmarks were hidden for years.
Of the known earmarks Mica netted from 2008 to 2010, most were geared toward public projects. Among them: $330,000 in 2009 for the nursing school at Bethune-Cookman University and $500,000 in 2010 to help build a visitor center at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in St. Augustine.
Rivals Mica, Adams Both Sought 'Earmarks' for Local Projects (Orlando Sentinal)
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