Casey Stengel, once asked about an unorthodox baseball strategy, replied, "Well, they say it couldn't be done, but it don't always work." Yesterday, the House formally approved new earmarks rules, permitting points of order on appropriations conference reports if new earmarks have been added during conference. After only twenty mintues of debate following such a point of order, the House will vote on whether to consider the conference report.

A final note on the Hamilton Project paper. A little less doom and gloom, this time. Inequality, and the decoupling of productivity gains and growth in the median income, has not caused the Hamiltonians to reconsider their core beliefs about markets. They are generally concerned that living standards have not improved as much as one would expect, given productivity gains. But they do not draw from this well-known trend that there is anything either ineffective or unfair about how the market operates.

CQ($) The [Homeland Security appropriations] legislation which passed 268-150 included Republican amendments adding funds for border fencing at the expense of the Homeland Security secretary's administrative budgets and a ban on funding implementation of new passport requirements for Western Hemisphere travelers. [...] Overall, the bill would provide $37.4 billion to the Homeland Security Department in fiscal 2008. Of that, $36.25 billion would be discretionary spending, $2.1 billion, or 6 percent, more than President Bush requested, and $4.3 billion, or 14 percent, more than in fiscal 2007.

To keep you up to date on the status of the appropriations process, we'll update and post the following chart indicating the status of each of the 12 federal spending bills. Each column represents a gatekeeper in both chambers for each bill - the responsible appropriations subcommittee, the full appropriations committee, and the full chamber. A green box indicates that the respective body has approved the bill and is awaiting approval of the next body. The number in each box is the dollar amount in billions that the body has appropriated.