Roll Call reports that the House Appropriations Committee had its website crashed yesterday by a flood of requests for earmarks. As a result of the problem, they've been forced to extend the deadline to give Members more time to submit requests:

In a sure sign that earmarks remain as popular as ever, an overload of pork requests clogged the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site Wednesday, forcing an extension to the request deadline to next week.

The committee extended its deadline for earmark requests until 11:59 p.m. on March 24 after a “massive influx of requests” caused “unavoidable access and processing delays,” wrote Rob Nabors, staff director for the committee, in a memo to Member offices.

And thus the Democrats act to dramatically reduce the number and scope of earmarks.