Can This Elephant Be Cleaned Up?

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Shadegg is not linked to lobbyists as much as the other two candidates, but he lacks the depth of support among colleagues that Blunt and Boehner established long before this race started. In the system that House Republicans have set up, members of Congress rise to leadership positions in part because of their ability to raise campaign cash. Aspiring leaders, who are often so popular in their own districts that they don't even have opponents, still raise millions of dollars so that they can give the money to others in tough races. They often raise this money through fund raisers organized by major business groups, and many of the donors are lobbyists. The result is that it is difficult to find a member of Congress with the clout and experience to be majority leader who doesn't have extensive lobbying ties, as do Blunt and Boehner.

One symptom of lobbying run amuck is the proliferation of earmarks--spending placed in legislation, often without public review, for specific projects. "Beating up on lobbyists is easy to do, but we have to put our own house in order, and at the top of that list is earmark reform," says Republican Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona. The most famous recent earmark was last fall's so-called Bridge to Nowhere--a provision that Representatives from Alaska inserted into a bill to spend close to $223 million to make it easier to reach a virtually uninhabited area of the state. In the end, the money was cut from the budget in light of public outrage. Lobbyists are paid to land earmarks; Abramoff used them to get money for his tribal clients. The number of those earmarks mushroomed from close to 2,000 in a highway bill in 1998 to more than 6,000 in that bill last year. Practitioners say the boom is a major factor in the doubling of the number of lobbyists in Washington over the past five years, to almost 35,000, and Bush points to the popular practice as one of the reasons curtailing federal spending is so difficult.

All three candidates have suggested that they would support earmark limits, a favorite McCain cause. Only Boehner has been specific about what he would change, saying he would try to prevent federal dollars from going to private entities for exclusively private purposes. This still wouldn't stop wasteful spending on unneeded bridges and other projects. But one plan would identify the sponsors of earmarks and force members to defend them, eliminating the many mysterious entries that now bristle in the budget. Blunt defends earmarks but has proposed tracking those who request them and how the money is spent. Boehner and Shadegg both say they have never had an earmark directed to their congressional district.

However inviting that pork may be as a rhetorical target, though, earmarks give House members a chance to direct money to particular interests, and it's unlikely that they will want to give up that power. So in the warrens of the Capitol, Republicans debate how they can project change while keeping things much the same. The big totals on future spreadsheets depend on it.