Washington -- For the second straight day, minority House Republicans ground the House to a standstill Wednesday as they drove home their objections to a Democratic plan to deny a floor vote on lawmakers' thousands of pet projects.
Public anger over the surging number of special member projects called earmarks -- derided as pork barrel spending -- was a factor in the Republicans' loss of House control last November, GOP members concede, and now they say they've gotten religion on the need for openness in government.
Charges of hypocrisy flew in floor speeches as House leaders huddled behind closed doors to seek a way out of a dispute that Republicans said showed Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi had backed down on promises of openness and disclosure made when they took power last January.
Democrats had hoped this week to pass four of the 12 annual bills that pay for federal operations beginning Oct. 1. Instead, Republicans have offered 116 amendments to a $37.4 billion Homeland Security spending bill -- the first of the bills on the floor -- in a bid to stall it. And on Tuesday they offered repeated motions to adjourn the House, each requiring a vote, keeping a wary House in session until 2:10 a.m. Wednesday.
Democrats argued Republicans were engaging in partisan attacks to try to embarrass Pelosi. They charged the GOP lawmakers lacked credibility on earmarks, the number of which exploded during their 12 years of House rule.
But Republicans cried foul over a plan by Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., for the House to pass all of the dozen spending bills without any earmarks.
Obey said House members from both parties -- even while expressing concern about rising government spending -- had inundated his committee with 33,000 earmark requests. He said it would take the committee's staff four weeks to study all those pork barrel requests and pare them to a manageable level.
Obey proposed to put the earmarks into the bill as the House prepares to confer with the Senate to reconcile the two chambers' different versions of the spending bills. Obey promised to disclose the list of the earmarks a month before such a conference, which Democrats hope to hold by late summer, so members and the public will have time to scrutinize and react to the projects.
But once the House-Senate conferees agree on a final bill, the rules of the House and Senate bar members from amending the legislation to remove individual items. That means, the Republicans charge, that Obey alone will decide on billions of dollars of federal spending affecting projects in practically every House district.
"The Obey policy is indefensible ... Obey's slush fund is indefensible," Rep. Adam Putnam, R-Fla., said as the House debated the Homeland Security spending bill, which provides a 6 percent increase over President Bush's request and would be 13 percent more than was spent last year.
"The new majority ran on a policy of openness, honesty and candor, and I suggest this is a policy that hardly promotes openness, honesty or candor," said Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga.
When Democrats took over the House last January, they passed rules saying that members behind all earmarks had to be identified, and that earmarks on all spending bills would be identified "before members are asked to vote on them," as Rules Committee Chairwoman Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., told the House.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, an outside watchdog group, said earmarks must be disclosed early in the process.
"Taxpayers have the fundamental right to know about all earmarks. Both congressional and administration projects should be disclosed in legislation before the full House casts a single vote," the group's president, Ryan Alexander, said in a statement.
Obey said that since he became chairman in January when Democrats formally took back House control, his committee has been swamped, in part because Republicans last year failed to complete the appropriations process.
That meant Congress had to spend last January finishing up that work, in which the thousands of earmarks the old Republican Congress had sought were killed for this fiscal year. He also said his work was hampered because Republicans had removed many of the committee's staff before ceding control. And then he had to deal with the long fight with Bush over Iraq war funding.
In 2005, according to the White House budget office, under Republican control of Congress there were 13,492 earmarks in appropriations bills totaling almost $19 billion.
"Our Republican friends are desperately looking for anything to squawk about because they haven't been able to find anything substantive to complain about," Obey said.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., heaped scorn on the Republicans. "What's funny is that many of the Republicans who are fighting for the right to vote against earmarks ... never met an earmark they didn't like," he said.
Even before the Republicans dug in their heels, the House faced a daunting timetable. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said he would keep the House in session into Saturday to pass the first four spending bills and send them to the Senate. That timetable is now in tatters.
