Ever wanted to do some investigative reporting on earmarks, but you just didn't know how to get started? Well, earmarkwatch.org is the site for you! You can dig into thousands of identified earmarks, with the help of research resources and relevant questions, to see if they're good public policy, or just pork barrel politics.

You've read his columns (excerpted maybe too often on this blog)- now you can read his new blog.

Roughing the passer, on CQ. That's a 15-yard penalty for this lede ($):

If Congress' appetite for earmarks has been greatly reduced by recent scandals and public pressure, it is not especially evident in the nation's largest domestic spending bill.

That is about seven-tenths of one percent of the bill's total discretionary spending of $150.7 billion...Lawmakers in charge of the legislation have estimated that they cut the volume of earmarks in the measure by 40 to 50 percent compared to fiscal 2005, the last year that the bill contained earmarks.

Image by Flickr user jotefa used under a Creative Commons license

What is discretionary spending? Well, in theory, it's spending that Congress should be able raise and lower with relatively greater ease than the other kind of spending, called mandatory spending. Discretionary programs' importance tends to change. Defense spending, for example, is discretionary. During war, we need to spend a great deal on defense; during peace, much less.

However, many programs that receive discretionary funding don't need such flexibility. Funding for veteran's health care is one example. It's always a priority to give veterans health care. Same could go for IRS funding, an argument that's been articulated by Nina Olson, the IRS National Taxpayer Advocate. We should always collect as much revenue as the tax code allows.

But IRS funding and funding for veteran's health care are a part of the annual discretionary budget process. That means that their funding must be weighed against other funding priorities and the perceived importance of reducing the budget deficit.

So often times, their budgets are much lower than ideal and performance suffers. Low budgets, for example, have put pressure on IRS to privatize tax collection, which is costly, dangerous and ineffective. And inadequate budgets gave rise to the poor conditions at Walter Reed Hospital uncovered last year.

Perhaps many other types of discretionary funding shouldn't be subject to the discretionary budget cap. And alternatively, we could get rid of the cap altogether, so there'd be much less need to make trade-offs between discretionary programs. But exempting certain programs from the discretionary budget process, or making some discretionary funding mandatory, might be a good half-way compromise.

With the departure of Tom DeLay and his jailed associates, Congressional Republicans have become the guardians of fair legislative process, or so they would have you believe. Take just about any issue where they have an unpopular stance, and it's almost guaranteed that they will finger-wag and bray about "playing politics" and so on.

Sometimes they have a point. The House SCHIP vote that got squeezed in at the last minute last week turned out to be mistake. And it's genuinely a good thing that conservatives pressed for earmark reform. But it can't be about process all the time. Every now and then, votes are about, you know, the policy.

Rarely will you hear that conservatives do not place a high enough priority on funding cancer research, Head Start, and veteran's health care at Walter Reed to vote for the Labor-HHS/VA appropriations bill. And rarely will you hear that they would like to keep taxes selectively low on hedge fund managers and CEOs, while letting taxes increase on the upper middle class- the goals of the AMT patch package. But this is what they'll be voting for. Ditto for denying 4 million children of health care coverage, which of course is not what they intend to do when they uphold President Bush's veto of SCHIP. And when war spending comes up, neither will they say that they would prefer to continue the war in Iraq for another year, thank you very much.

Opponents of progress will always hide behind the troops and trumped-up process concerns, but hopefully they'll continue to be met on policy grounds, where liberals are strongest.