Antipork Progress

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The Wall Street Journal Editorial

Antipork Progress
September 26, 2006; Page A14

As Republicans lurch toward November, they're trying to reclaim their birthright as fiscal conservatives. So far they're moved up to a D from an F, with a chance to still grab a gentleman's C. In the small favors department, the House this month passed an "earmark" reform to bring more transparency to the runaway process of sticking pork into appropriations bills. Give House Majority Leader John Boehner credit for staring down his party's Appropriations Committee barons on this one; that's more than Tom DeLay or Roy Blunt ever did when they ran the majority.

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It's also no accident that the new transparency rule won't apply to the 10 spending bills the House has already passed this year. Meanwhile, the Senate has yet to act, and the new House rule expires at the end of this Congress. GOP appropriators figure that they can block its renewal in January, when the election heat is off, assuming their bad spending habits haven't cost Republicans their majority. In a better sign of progress, President Bush will today sign the "Federal Transparency Act," which will create a searchable public database of some $1 trillion worth of federal grants, contracts and loans. The brainchild of Senators Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma) and Barack Obama (D., Illinois), the database will help the public identify the lawmakers who sponsor these provisions. The idea is to expose these favors to public scrutiny and force their authors to defend them.

The next test of GOP spending sincerity is whether the Senate will force an up-or-down vote on the "legislative" line-item veto. This would let a President strike out individual spending items from larger legislation, sending them back to Congress for an override vote within 14 legislative days. A simple majority vote would be enough to override, so this item veto isn't as powerful as the one that Republicans gave to Bill Clinton in the 1990s and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But it would still give the President more leverage to kill the most egregious earmarks.

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