WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — Nine months after Congressional leaders vowed to respond to several bribery scandals with comprehensive reforms, their pledges have come to next to nothing.
House prepared to take up a rule requiring individual lawmakers to sign their names to some of the pet projects they tuck into major tax and spending bills. As an internal House rule, the requirement would be in effect only until the end of the session, just a few weeks away.
While reform advocates denounced the proposal as nearly toothless, its bite was still too sharp for many in Congress. By Wednesday night the resolution appeared to be bogged down in a three-way squabble among Republicans, Democrats and the powerful members of the House Appropriations Committee.
“It has been a very pathetic showing,” said Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for the reform group Common Cause. Even with one congressman in jail, a well-known lobbyist on the way and several other members and staff members still under investigation, she said: “The response to this has been nothing. It has been silence.”
The resolution was a chance for House Republican leaders to make good on at least some element of their pledges in January, when Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader, declared his party’s agenda at risk “because of a growing perception that Congress is for sale” and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois declared that “now is the time for action.”
The Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff had recently pleaded guilty to paying bribes to members of Congress, including treating some to a lavish golf trip to Scotland. Former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, had pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from a military contractor. Both scandals involved lobbyists paying bribes for “earmarks” — the special interest projects inserted into major spending bills by individual lawmakers, often anonymously and with little scrutiny. House Republican attempts at new rules have been dismissed as paltry by both reform advocates and Democrats. Mr. Hastert initially called for a ban on all Congressional travel at private expense and tightening the limits on lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers and staff (the current limit is $50, or $250 if the recipient is considered a friend). Others pushed for doubling the one-year waiting period before departing lawmakers and staff members can lobby their former colleagues.
But the lobbying reform bill that passed the House this year was scaled back to drop all these ideas. Instead, it focused on requiring lobbyists to disclose more of their dealings with members and staffs. The Senate passed a very different bill, and aides in both chambers say they are not expected to be reconciled into a final bill this year.
The final thrust of the House reform agenda was a measure to address earmarks — a favorite idea of Mr. Boehner. He initially called for substantive restrictions on their insertion in spending bills but eventually settled for a measure to at least illuminate the murky practice by requiring the public identification of the member who sought each earmark.
But the Republican leaders’ draft resolution defined earmarks only as funds for organizations outside the federal government, like cities, universities, museums or nonprofit groups. It would not apply to earmarks directing money to the Defense Department or other federal agencies to execute projects, which account for the vast majority of the federal money spent on earmarks.
Some called the proposed rule almost pointless since members are often eager to boast of the earmarks they secure for constituents. “There is an element you can’t legislate, and that is shame,” said Representative Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona and a frequent critic of earmarks. “You have got to have some embarrassment when you bring to the floor an earmark for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
But the members of the House Appropriations Committee found even that too onerous. The appropriators, who have authority over all federal discretionary spending, objected from the start that the Republican leaders were unfairly singling out their favored projects without imposing the same level of scrutiny on the special interest provisions that other committees tuck into tax bills or other laws.
On Wednesday afternoon, Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee, convened a meeting of the 64-member committee to consider a draft of the proposed rule. Although the Republican leaders had added some new requirements for disclosure by tax committees and others, the appropriators deemed them inadequate. (Mr. Lewis’s ties to a lobbyist who procured earmarks are currently under scrutiny by federal investigators; he has said he did nothing wrong.)
After the meeting, the appropriators demanded changes and threatened to oppose the resolution, said John Scofield, a spokesman for the committee. “We delivered a message to the leaders that we are not there yet,” Mr. Scofield said, adding that the committee plans to consider earmark disclosure requirements of its own next week.
House Democrats, meanwhile, submitted a proposed amendment to the Republican resolution that was so comprehensive it would upend much of the way Washington does business — and thus was all but certain to fail.
The Democratic proposal would block members of Congress from sponsoring earmarks that would benefit any former staff members or family members. Many Congressional staff members and lawmakers’ relatives eventually work as lobbyists, and the proposal would limit their ability to make money for seeking earmarks for their clients.
Jo Maney, a spokeswoman for the Republican-controlled House rules committee, said the committee rejected the proposal as too broadly worded and “poorly thought out.”
Although it is unlikely that such a far-reaching proposal could pass a vote of the Democratic caucus, its rejection by the Republicans could give the Democrats a pretext for opposing the Republicans’ milder reform proposal as too weak.
“Transparency is not enough,” said Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who was a sponsor of the proposal. “You can’t be pushing for earmarks that are a clear conflict of interest.” Asked if he believed most Democrats would support his measure, Mr. Van Hollen challenged Republicans to put it to a vote.
If Democrats and the Republican appropriators are opposed to the resolution, it would stand little chance of passing.
Late Wednesday night, Ms. Maney of the Rules committee said the panel was meeting to work out technical changes.
But Fred Wertheimer, president of the reform advocacy group Democracy 21, called the dispute over the scaled-back earmark rule “absurd.”
“They have had months to reach an agreement even among House Republicans about what this fig leaf should look like,” he said, “and they still haven’t been able to do it.”
