No wonder people are cynical about Congress

The Democrats campaigned in 2006 about cleaning up the pipeline for pork projects that legislators have been slipping into bills at an increasing rate in the past decade. And, unsurprisingly, now that they're in office, all bets are off.

Upon taking control of Congress after November's midterm elections, Democrats vowed to try to halve the number of earmarks, and to require lawmakers to disclose their requests and to certify that the money they are requesting will not benefit them.

But the new majority is already skirting its own reforms.

Perhaps the biggest retreat from that pledge came this week, when House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) told fellow lawmakers that he intends to keep requests for earmarks out of pending spending bills, at least for now. Obey said the committee will deal with them at the end of the appropriations process in the closed-door meetings between House and Senate negotiators known as conference committees.

Democrats had complained bitterly in recent years that Republicans routinely slipped multimillion-dollar pet projects into spending bills at the end of the legislative process, preventing any chance for serious public scrutiny. Now Democrats are poised to do the same.

"I don't give a damn if people criticize me or not," Obey said.

Mark Tapscott writes that the inability of Congress to police themselves increases the need for term limits.

It doesn’t make much difference anymore which party has the congressional majority. The Senate’s Water Resources Development bill, for instance, has 446 earmarks, the House version 692. (Earmarks are measures giving members of Congress exclusive control over the spending of federal tax dollars on a project they favor.)

Those figures exceed the then-unprecedented total for the 2006 GOP version of the same bill, despite Democrats’ promises last year to clean up the Republicans’ culture of corruption epitomized by the explosion of earmarks between 1996 and 2006.

Ed Morrissey is skeptical that term limits are the right cure. My response would be - we're never going to get term limits since it would require two-thirds of each House to vote for such an amendment to be sent out to the states. It just isn't going to happen. So we should focus on expanding transparency to let us know what politicians are stuffing into bills. One thing we learned from the 2006 election is that trumpeting the pork that a legislator had brought back home wasn't enough to keep them in office. People are waking up to the reality that pork, even when it's for their district or state, isn't always enough to keep a weak incumbent in office. Sure, we won't throw all the rascals out, but we're not going to get an amendment for term limits so let's work with what we have.