Details of New House Rules Package

Today is the official start of the 111th Congress, with new Senators and Representatives being sworn in and votes on a new rules package expected in the House. The House Majority Leaders office put out a fact sheet that describes the new rules package. Donny Shaw, blogging over at OpenCongress has a nice summary of some of the key changes in the House rules, or you can read more details about the new rules package on the House Rules Committee website.

The two big issues we are following in the new rules package are PAYGO and earmark disclosure. Let's start with PAYGO. The new rules continue what the Speaker's office and Majority Leader's office are calling the "tough PAYGO rules" from the 110th Congress that helped "reinstitute fiscal discipline." The House PAYGO rule is also aligned with the Senate's version so both the House and Senate can use the same baseline from the Congressional Budget Office. This alignment is a smart change, but I cringe every time Democrats trumpet their move to reinstate PAYGO in the 110th Congress and claim the righteousness of fiscal responsibility. While it is better to have the rules on the books than not, too often legislation was passed in the 110th Congress that was not deficit neutral, particularly when it came to tax cuts. So while the 110th Congress was better than most in recent memory, there is still a long way to go before we can say Congress shows true fiscal discipline. Democrats (and Republicans too) are going to need to bring a stronger commitment to actually following PAYGO rules during the 111th.

Second, earmark disclosure. It appears new rules for disclosure of earmark requests are continuing to inch toward the 21st Century, sort of. The releases from the Democratic leadership are a bit vague about earmark rules, but the Appropriations Committee Chairman - Rep. David Obey (D-WI) in the House and new Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) - also issued a release today that gives a bit more detail. The two major reforms come closer to embracing a proposal that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) introduced during the 110th Congress that would post information on earmarks online before votes on legislation, not after. Specifically, Obey and Inouye are calling for:

Posting Requests Online: To offer more opportunity for public scrutiny of member requests, members will be required to post information on their earmark requests on their websites at the time the request is made explaining the purpose of the earmark and why it is a valuable use of taxpayer funds.

Early Public Disclosure: To increase public scrutiny of committee decisions, earmark disclosure tables will be made publically available the same day as the House or Senate Subcommittee rather than Full Committee reports their bill or 24 hours before Full Committee consideration of appropriations legislation that has not been marked up by a Senate Subcommittee.

It isn't exactly clear how this new online disclosure rules will work or how much good it will do. For instance, in order to track and analyze the earmark requests, a clear link between a Member's earmark request website information and the Appropriations Subcommittee tables will be necessary. It would be better for public access and easier for lawmakers if earmark requests were put into a central online database that was fully searchable, but getting them to put information up online at all, and before voting, is a welcome and long overdue change.

Update:
Bill Allison at the Sunlight Foundation has a more succinct post about the proposed earmark reforms and why Congress can't create a better system. And Roll Call has a story up about the new rules as well, although there isn't much new info there.

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