An op-ed piece in today's Washington Times entitled "GOP to use earmarks issue on foes" details a House GOP plan to target freshman Democratic members of that chamber on the grounds that they...hold on, they must have done or not done something bad relating to earmarks. But what? Well, a clue is offered by this attack on first-term Cong. Nancy Boyda (D-KS) from Kyle Robertson, the campaign manager of the incumbent she unseated in 2006: "Voters simply cannot trust Boyda to keep her promise to reform the earmark process." Mr. Robertson, it's a little late for that -- Nancy Boyda voted in favor of earmark process reform in her first month in office. In fact, in 2007, the the Democratic-led Congress required members to attach their names to their earmarks for the first time and reduce the amount of earmarks to $13 billion, half the amount in 2006 and the lowest level since 2000. So what is all this shouting about? Could it be an effort to distract voters from the record, which is that under Republican rule, pork-spending in Congress jumped from $12 billion in 1999 to $29 billion in 2006, the Times op-ed points out. "The Republicans are the last people who should be lecturing on earmark reform," said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Doug Thornell. "They have absolutely no credibility on this issue." Would-be reformers should feel free to lead by example -- if earmarks are as nefarious as they seem to imply, they should simply refuse to seek any for their own districts. Then they might actually begin to get credibility on this issue.