Waffling on an 'earmark' pledge

Friday, June 15, 2007

When the Democrats took over Congress this year, they promised an end to the Republicans' free-spending, iron-fisted ways and part of that was a pledge to publicly list "earmarks" and their congressional sponsors on the spending bills as they came out of committee.

Earmarks are the pet spending projects of individual lawmakers, a particularly egregious example being the notorious Alaskan "bridge to nowhere." In and of themselves earmarks are not necessarily bad, but they escape normal budget scrutiny and they exploded under GOP control. The Appropriations Committee has 32,000 requests for earmarks on its hands.

Presumably, these should be posted and the full House able to vote on them, but Appropriations chairman David Obey, D-Wis., says he and the committee staff need time to study them.

Obey would send bills to the floor minus the earmarks and only add them just before the bills go to joint House-Senate conference committees for final approval. This gives opponents less time to mobilize and makes it easier for the leadership to slip through favored earmarks.

Obey, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top aides must surely be mulling the expression, "Be careful what you wish for." Fortunately, there is still time for them to keep their word.