Earmark ban

The Senate will ban earmarks, the Senate’s appropriations chief announced this week. Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye said he would enforce a two-year moratorium on setting money aside for individual legislators’ pet projects, following a similar pledge by the Republican-controlled House and a threat by President Obama to veto any bill sent to him with earmarks.

Inouye, an ardent defender of Congress’s spending authority, acceded to the moratorium as pressure mounted to halt a practice widely seen as wasteful. “Given the reality before us,” he said, “it makes no sense to accept earmark requests that have no chance of being enacted into law.”