Fix Congress, Not the Lobbyists

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE moments when you realize Congress is not an altogether serious body. There have been others. One that comes to mind is the frantic effort several decades ago to stop the National Football League from blacking out home games on local television (unless stadium tickets have already sold out). This time it's worse. The current drive for lobbying reform is purely cosmetic. And it skirts the real issue. Lobbyists, for all their selfish intentions and dubious methods, aren't the problem. Members of Congress and the way they spend taxpayers' money are.

Lobbyists will always be with us. Barring them from taking members of Congress or staffers to lunch won't fundamentally alter the relationship between lobbyists and legislators. Nor will a ban on gifts to members or their aides. And while a prohibition on congressional travel paid for by private groups is a good idea, it's not a meaningful curb on potential corruption in Congress. Democrats want to establish a new office of public integrity to examine disclosure statements by lobbyists for possible violations. This is flyspecking.

Congress is noisily responding to the wrong scandal. Based on what we know now, disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff is chiefly to blame for fleecing Indian tribes. Yes, he financed a golfing excursion to Scotland by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and may have prompted wrongdoing by Republican Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. But these incidents alone don't touch on the real source of corruption.

The case that does involves Republican Rep. Duke Cunningham of California, who resigned from Congress after admitting taking bribes. This case exposed the incentives to corruption produced by the spending and budget practices of Congress. For a price, Cunningham would slip spending measures into appropriations bills with practically no one's noticing. The sheer complexity and opaqueness of the budget made it easy to do so.

It's not just so-called earmarks that lead to trouble. More broadly, it's the fact that Congress spends so much, and often in deceptive ways that go beyond earmarks, that makes Capitol Hill a rich target for lobbyists. So what's needed isn't lobbying reform, which deals merely with the symptom. What's needed is congressional reform.

Some members of Congress have known this for a long time. Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a fearless critic of earmarks, says that restrictions on lobbyists amount to "peripheral reform at best. We first have to look at our own conduct." Republican Rep. Mike Pence says the budget process has "led to excessive spending and outright corruption."

At the top of the list of reforms is the transformation of the congressional budget resolution into a legally binding document, signed by the president. Now it's merely advisory, yet it gives the public the impression that Congress is holding down spending. Congress then regularly exceeds the budget limit set in the resolution with impunity.

Another current abuse is "emergency" spending. True, there are legitimate emergencies, such as Hurricane Katrina. But emergency bills are regularly larded with routine expenditures not related to any emergency. Legislation proposed by Republican Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Jeb Hensarling of Texas would carefully define emergencies as "sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary" and limit spending to those cases.

Earmarks, which Republicans have shamelessly expanded, should be outlawed entirely or, at a minimum, bear an actual "earmark" to identify the expenditure with the legislator who's inserting it. The current process allows members of Congress to insert earmarks anonymously. "There's no requirement the spending be attributed to anyone," says Pence. Often when earmarks are "exposed to the light of day, no one steps forward to take credit," he says. By attaching a name, "you would create greater transparency and greater accountability overnight."

As things now stand, the president has the authority to pluck spending measures from the budget and ask Congress to revoke them. The process is called "recission," but it doesn't work because Congress usually ignores the president's requests. The solution? Force Congress to take up proposed recissions on an expedited basis. This is another way of exposing spending abuses.

Then there's the nuclear option. No, not the one to bar Senate filibusters of judicial nominations. I'm referring to term limits: three terms for House members, two for senators. This is an extreme measure, but there's a strong rationale for it if one really desires to reduce the influence of lobbyists.