The Senate Republicans have shown more creativity in their first few days out of power than they did in the previous six years while they were in power.

Democrats are having their own problems cleaning up bad spending habits, and that’s after only a few days in power. Yesterday on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Harry Reid was caught pulling out every stop to kill his own party’s plan for earmark reform.

To Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s credit, House Democrats recently passed ethics legislation that included provisions making earmarks more transparent. The House bill included a broad definition of earmarks, thereby making it harder to hide them in, say, last-minute conference reports. It also requires Members to file a public disclosure form when they request an earmark, and to state that neither they nor their spouses will financially benefit. It’s hard to argue that this is anything but elementary good government.

Unless you are Harry Reid. The ethics reform offered by Senate Democrats contained none of these tougher earmark provisions. So Senate Republicans, led by South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, cheekily took the identical language of the House earmark bill and offered it as an amendment to the Senate version. Numerous Democrats instantly denounced it, apparently unaware (or unconcerned) that the language had been sponsored by Ms. Pelosi.

Democrat Dick Durbin then moved to table the amendment, though he lost by 51 to 46. Of the 46 Senators who voted to banish Ms. Pelosi’s reform, 38 of them were her fellow Democrats. The seven Republicans who went along with Mr. Reid included some of the GOP’s biggest spenders (Trent Lott) and Members of the Appropriations Committee, aka Earmark Central Station. When Senator DeMint then moved to have his amendment accepted by voice vote — which is customary — Mr. Durbin objected. The effect of these procedural run-arounds was to give Mr. Reid more time to twist a few more Democratic arms into killing earmark reform.

Clever.  Now if they will only spend half as much time actually adhering to the ethics proposals they use to hoodwink the Dems they might be able to regain the Senate someday.

Naughty list (’Pubs who voted to table the amendment despite probably being in on the gimmick):

  • Robert Bennett
  • Jim Bunning
  • Pete Domenici
  • Orrin Hatch
  • Trent Lott
  • Gordon Smith
  • George Voinovich

Nice list (Dems who voted against tabling the amendment):

  • Maria Cantwell
  • Rusell Feingold
  • Tom Harkin
  • John Kerry
  • Mary Landrieu
  • Bill Nelson
  • Barack Obama
  • Jon Tester
  • Jim Webb

The big shocker for me: Ted ”Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens against tabling the amendment.

The more I think about this the more frustrating it is to see that Republicans view ethics reform as nothing more than a political weapon.  While they were in power they did everything they could to stymie any ethics reform, but now that they are out of power they act so damn pious.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Ethics Scandals, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.