Well, good news came in late last night as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) announced he struck a deal with House Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Olver (D-MA) to remove language that would prohibit the publication of Federal agency budget justifications (See my post last night for more info). This is fantastic news - congrats to Sen. Coburn for standing up for transparency. You can read his statement released last night on his website.

Remember when the Democrats came to power earlier this year and promised to end the culture of corruption in Washington? Then remember when they passed a fairly significant lobbying and ethics reform bill? Ok, then what is going on here - Roll Call: Earmarks in, Reforms out of Trans-HUD Measure Roll Call reported today on some disturbing news - that the Transportation-Housing and Urban Development (T-HUD) appropriations bill has include earmarks that have not been disclosed yet under earmark transparency rules. In total, 18 earmarks worth $24 million were included in the conference report for the bill. The House Rules Committee website claims the vast majority of these new earmarks are for relatively benign projects. Yikes. Let's go through this. First off, who is deciding the relative benign-ness of these projects? Maybe Duke Cunningham thought the earmarks he was including as paybacks to companies who bribed him were "relatively benign" too? Wouldn't it be better to let everyone see them from the beginning and let an open process decide their benigninivity? Second, if the vast majority are relatively benign, what are the ones that are not benign? Shouldn't those be excluded until they can be properly reviewed? That's not even the worst of the news in the Roll Call article. The T-HUD bill also includes language that prohibits federal agencies from disclosing their "budget justification" documents to any committee in Congress other than the appropriations committees before the May 31 after the president's budget is released. I assume this would mean those agencies could not make these documents public either, as many of them do now. All this comes after OMB Watch joined with the National Taxpayers Union and 52 other organizations last year to strongly support the publication of these documents and we were ultimately successful as OMB agreed to voluntarily publish the budget justifications. The fact that there are attempts moving forward to clamp down on access to this information is truly unfortunate. What happened to the cleanest, most open Congress in history?

I've been thinking about President Bush's actions this week on fiscal policy, and I've got to admit, I'm pretty darn confused. Let's review:

• Bush vetoed the $150.7 billion Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which contained a 4.3 percent increase in funding, for containing too much spending, but signed the $471 billion Defense appropriations bill, which had a 9.5 percent increase in funding. Bush has also been pressuring Congress to approve an additional $197 billion in "emergency" war funding. Huh?
• Bush has vowed to veto the AMT patch bill moving (slowly) through Congress because it is fiscally responsible and doesn't add to the deficit. Wait, what?

I suppose Bush believes we should never pass a tax increase and continue to burden our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt. But he is vetoing appropriations bills left and right over much smaller levels of funding (less than 10% as much in many cases) that are not deficit financed. It's difficult for me to understand exactly how the president decides to be the decider on these issues. He has shown he doesn't really care about fiscal responsibility (based on his position on the AMT bill, and, well, on his horrendous fiscal record as president. Actually, he's probably the worst fiscal manager we've ever had as president). He also doesn't seem to care about giving Americans the support and investments they need to succeed - unless those Americans are currently living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or on a military base. Even then his support is suspect as he has worked to cut back veteran's health benefits and often stiffed soldiers on pay increases. Most of the increases are more likely to end up with Halliburton or Lockheed Martin than soldiers). So what is guiding the president in these decisions, if anything at all? Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly may have the answer: It's funny how much more opposed Bush is to Democratic pork than he was to Republican pork, isn't it? But whatever. I don't think anyone seriously believes that Bush really cares about the earmarks in this bill. Basically, he seems to have decided that the only way to stay relevant is to veto stuff. Within the borders of the United States, it's pretty much the only influence he has left. Democrats don't care about him, Republicans wish he'd go away, and the American public is bored with his snooze-inducing speeches. What else can he do to attract attention? Drum just might be right, particularly considering that the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that since 2001, Bush has signed 50 appropriations bill from Republican Congresses that exceeded his budget requests - failing to veto a single one of them. Bush has already been a born-again Christian once. He can't claim to have found religion on this issue too.

Ever wanted to do some investigative reporting on earmarks, but you just didn't know how to get started? Well, earmarkwatch.org is the site for you! You can dig into thousands of identified earmarks, with the help of research resources and relevant questions, to see if they're good public policy, or just pork barrel politics.