Bills that go bump in the night

That heavy thump you heard shortly after midnight on Monday was the sound of a 3,565-page spending bill landing on the legislative calendar. How many pages will lawmakers have read by they time they vote on it? Five hundred maybe, or possibly a thousand if they’re both conscientious and quick.

But it’s impolite to count. No one is going to get through the legislation before it becomes law. That’s the point. For the odd thing about the omnibus is that despite its bulk — it contains 11 spending bills — it is actually built for speed. It is designed to skate through the House, proceed just as swiftly through the Senate, return to the House with funds for the Iraq war and get lawmakers out of town.

Consider what has been excised: a provision easing restrictions on trade with Cuba — out; language allowing federal aid to go to clinics that counsel on abortion — out; language forcing the government to pay prevailing wages — out. All of these controversial policy riders were cut to avoid President Bush’s veto.

Now consider what has been included. Knowing passage is likely, lawmakers shoveled the omnibus full of pork. There are at least 9,200 earmarks in the combined bills — 696 pages of line items, many “airdropped” in at the last moment. The omnibus contains $11 billion of “emergency” spending but that phrase is used so loosely that it includes $100 million for next year’s presidential nominating conventions.

So here we are at the end of 2007 and another round of appropriating will have been completed without the irksome task of doing it transparently. It has happened this way for decades under Republicans and Democrats alike.

President Reagan blasted the process in 1988 and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) blasted it in 1998. Someone will blast it again in 2008, for nothing will have changed.

Like St. Augustine praying, “Lord, make me good, but not yet,” Congress doffs its cap to reform. It establishes procedures to reduce earmarks and to shame the authors of the most egregious. But then leaders negotiate secretly and cobble together a massive, misshapen bill that mocks any suggestion that a new leaf has been turned on Capitol Hill.

It is both weird and easy to understand the core paradox of congressional appropriations, which is this: Almost everyone agrees that the system is broken, and almost nobody is willing to do anything about it.