The Democrats promised reform when they took back Congress, but those promises continue to unravel. Though they came to power promising to take the mystery out of earmarking, and require full disclosure, Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey recently said that earmarks will only be inserted in legislation at the last minute--immediately before final passage:

House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) said Tuesday he would not include earmarks in appropriations bills until they reach conference, angering some of his Republican counterparts and prompting accusations that Democrats were going against their pledge to reform and bring transparency to the earmarking process...

Any such earmarks dropped into the conference report will comply with House disclosure rules, Obey promised.

“If we choose to insert earmarks in conference, it will be under the rules that require every one to be inserted by name,” he said.

But Republicans complain that Obey’s decision effectively bars Members from attempting to strike individual earmarks on the House floor, and they fear Democrats could use the threat of losing earmarks as a club over Republicans.

Under the rules adopted by House Democrats at the start of the Congress, pork-barrel projects inserted into conference reports are subject to the same disclosure requirements as earmarks in other legislation. However, conference reports are pretty much never amended on the House floor, removing the ability to strip egregious wastes of taxpayer money. Furthermore, conference reports are typically voted on mere hours after they are agreed to; there's rarely enough time to read the report--even if you can get your hands on it.

It's also hard to take Chairman Obey's promises on disclosure seriously, since he asserted the right a few months ago to insert a whole class of earmarks without any disclosure at all. The underpinning for the argument seems to be that when a committee chair introduces a bill with earmarks, he isn't really a person bound by disclosure rules--he's more of an institution.

The backtracking on earmarks hasn't gone entirely unnoticed; CNN recently produced this piece on the failure of Congressional Democrats to clean up the institution as promised. Obey and his counterpart in the Senate--Robert Byrd--feature prominently:

The more things change...