Earmark proponents have argued that allowing lawmakers to ensure money for specific projects would restore power to the legislative branch and shift it away from the Biden administration. They also believe a return to earmarks will help make the institution more functional: The practice can be a useful tool for congressional leaders who are trying to corral votes for bills.

“I’m a yes,” said veteran Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.). “With the changes with transparency — it’s not the Upton Road to the Upton House, you have support in writing from local units of government — I think that’s a fair approach.”

The House GOP held a special, two-hour conference meeting last week to debate the topic before Wednesday’s vote. Now the pressure is on for the Senate GOP to follow suit.

The Senate is separately working out an agreement to bring back earmarks. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would defer on the issue to Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Shelby has said he’s supportive. But Senate Republicans have been generally more receptive to earmarks than their House counterparts.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the top Republican appropriator on the Homeland Security spending panel, told POLITICO earlier this week that GOP members are “probably all over the board” on the issue.

“There are some who are serving now who never lived in an earmark world,” Capito said. “I think as a conference we’re going to have a big discussion on this. I don’t know when, but we better do it soon.”

Earmark critics in the GOP, including the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, remain adamantly opposed to the maneuver and are refusing to take advantage of it, even though it will now be permissible for all House Republicans. They argue that the practice is ripe for abuse and would only lead to “pork-barrel” spending.

Republicans first banned the practice following numerous earmark controversies and scandals that helped end the careers of lawmakers in both parties during the early 2000s. Perhaps the best-known earmark flap came over the infamous “bridge to nowhere” — a massive proposal to build a bridge between Ketchikan, Alaska, and a nearby island with an airport.

“We’ve got $30 trillion in debt, and people are tired of the swamp. And the GOP should be ashamed of itself if it jumps headfirst right back into the swamp,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a leading earmark opponent.

House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) is already plowing ahead with an overhaul of the politically taboo spending system, which includes capping the overall amount of money spent on earmarks to 1 percent of discretionary spending and allowing lawmakers to submit no more than 10 project requests.

All requests would be posted online, lawmakers and their immediate families can’t have a financial stake in the requests and funds can’t flow to for-profit recipients, DeLauro said. A federal watchdog will periodically audit a sampling of earmarks, and members must justify their requests with evidence from their communities.

Biden declined to elaborate on the consequences Putin would face, saying that “you’ll see shortly.” But he maintained the U.S. could “walk and chew gum at the same time” with regard to its Russia foreign policy.

“There are places where it’s in our mutual interest to work together,” Biden said, pointing specifically to the two governments’ extension of the New START nuclear nonproliferation treaty in January.

“That occurred while he’s doing this,” Biden said of Putin’s election interference efforts. “But that’s overwhelmingly in the interest of humanity.”

Biden’s remarks come after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified assessment Tuesday which found that Putin authorized “influence operations aimed at denigrating” Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party while “supporting” former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.

The influence operations, conducted by various Russian government organizations, also had as their goal “undermining public confidence in the electoral process” and “exacerbating sociopolitical divisions” in the U.S., according to the ODNI assessment.

Russia previously “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” former special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his March 2019 report.

Biden, who dealt with Putin throughout the Obama administration, has on several occasions recounted a 2011 meeting during which the then-vice president reportedly told the Russian leader: “I don’t think you have a soul.”

“I did say that to him, yes,” Biden told Stephanopoulos in the interview that aired Wednesday. “And his response was, ‘We understand one another.’ I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. That’s how it came about.”

“Look, the most important thing in dealing with foreign leaders, in my experience — and I’ve dealt with an awful lot of them over my career — is just know the other guy,” the president added.

Asked by Stephanopoulos whether he thinks Putin “is a killer,” Biden replied: “Mm hmm. I do.”

Biden’s remarks on filibuster reform are his strongest to date; White House press secretary Jen Psaki said earlier Tuesday that the president’s preference was “not to make changes” to filibuster rules, but that he was also “open to hearing ideas.”

Biden, a longtime creature of the Senate, is facing a growing call among Democrats and progressives to push for ending the legislative filibuster, which requires 60 votes to move forward on most legislation in the Senate. It’s an issue that has alarmed those in his party, who hold the majority in a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, and are worried about potential gridlock.

But in his interview, Biden did not explicitly say whether he wanted to eliminate the 60-vote threshold. And it’s not clear how much of a change reinstating the talking filibuster would bring. Under the current Senate rules, a senator can still seize the floor and delay, depending on the procedure.

In a floor speech on Monday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) supported potential filibuster reform, saying that as it stood, the filibuster was “making a mockery of American democracy.”

“I’ve long been open to changing the Senate rules to restore the standing filibuster,” he said. “If a senator insists on blocking the will of the Senate, he should at least pay the minimal price of being present, no more phoning it in.”

However, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned Democrats on the Senate floor on Tuesday about nixing the decades-old filibuster. Republicans would use other Senate rules, he said, to bring the chamber to a complete standstill, “like a 100-car pile up, nothing moving.”

“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin, to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like,” McConnell said.

Biden’s backing of the talking filibuster — which would require a senator to speak on the Senate floor to hold up legislation — echoed comments made by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat. But Manchin has also been adamant that he does not want to eliminate the 60-vote threshold, under any circumstances.

“I want to make it very clear to everybody: There’s no way that I would vote to prevent the minority from having input into the process in the Senate. That means protecting the filibuster,” Manchin told POLITICO last week. “It must be a process to get to that 60-vote threshold.”

As of now, Democrats need to persuade at least 10 Republicans to end debate and vote for a bill, while making sure no one breaks ranks, in order to pass legislation.

Given the bitterly partisan battle over Biden’s Covid relief package, Democrats view the likelihood of bipartisan support for some of Biden’s key promises, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 or voting rights reform, as virtually nonexistent.

Even the president, who frequently extols the need for bipartisanship in Washington, acknowledged the difficulties that could arise from the filibuster.

“It’s getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning,” he said.

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.