I was one of those who had hoped that President Bush would have vetoed the ethics bill that was sent to him by Congress several weeks ago. Not because I was against earmark reform, but because i though that the bill was a sham compared to what had originally been proposed by the new Democratic Congress when they took office. The problem was that President Bush would have gotten killed in the media had he vetoed it - it would have been played up as "Bush Against Ethics Reform".

My fears about the ethics bill having been a toothless sham have been realized, according to CQPolitics.com. Basically, it boils down to legalistic parsing. According to the fine print in the new regulations, earmarks attached to an appropriation bill after conference can be challenged and must be transparent, but authorization bills can be secretly earmarked and no-one can challenge them. In addition, if a member of Congress decides for some reason that he or she wants to attach a secret earmark to the appropriations bill, all they have to do is add it in conference, and the transparency aspects of the new ethics bill does not apply.

Less than two weeks after the Senate's new earmark rules took effect, critics are accusing Democrats of providing less openness than promised. Only appropriations earmarks will be subject to challenge via points of order, not the abundant special provisions scattered through authorization bills. And a reading of the fine print shows that the public disclosure of earmark information, one of the big changes of the lobbying and ethics law (PL 110-81), doesn't have to happen until a late stage in the legislative process. "This is one of the most bald-faced bait and switches I've seen in Washington," Steve Ellis, vice president for programs at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said Monday. "We have to have some shame," said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who has been a thorn in the side of leadership in both parties on earmarking and federal spending issues. "We have to have some honor in this body."

In essence, all a member of Congress has to do now to continue to abuse the practice of earmarks (secrecy in the ownership of the earmark, inability for the floor to challenge the earmark) is attach them to a different bill. Read the article, including the clarification remarks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Taking advantage of this loophole is obviously something that leadership had planned on doing for quite a while now, even as they were publicly claiming that they had cleaned up the earmark process.