Just before the August recess began, Senate and House conferees — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meeting in secret — put together an ethics reform bill that both chambers then passed with few dissenting votes. Supposedly, this legislation fulfills the Democrats’ 2006 campaign promise to clean up the corruption left by the departing Republican majority.
There are solid grounds for doubting whether the bill actually achieves much of anything in the way of concrete reform, particularly in the area of earmarks, but that is a topic for another day. What is fascinating now is how the Democrats left town for the recess without sending the ethics reform bill to President Bush for his signature, reportedly for fear that the chief executive would either veto it outright or use a pocket veto to kill the measure. That’s when the president simply lets a bill die by not signing it within 10 days after it arrives on his desk, as provided by the Constitution.
The idea that Bush will veto the bill makes no sense because it was passed with veto-proof margins in both chambers, 83-14 in the Senate and 411-8 in the House. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the vast majority of congressmen — career politicians all — have zero interest in the earmark portion of ethics reform. Last week, the Club for Growth released its superlative RePork Card, which found that 105 House members voted against all 50 proposed amendments to remove earmarks from legislation before the House. The Democrats’ overall average score was a pitiful 2 percent, while the Republicans averaged a mere 43 percent.
These career politicians are in no mood to stop earmarking tax dollars to benefit their friends, family members, contributors and favored special interests. Quite the contrary: They’ve been on an earmark rampage in recent months. To cite but two examples, the defense spending bill contains more than 1,300 earmarks worth in excess of $3 billion, while the energy bill has more than 1,000 costing $3.2 billion.
No wonder Pelosi and Reid are waiting as long as possible — there are hundreds of career politicians with pockets to fill with tax dollars.
