After a month away for some baby-kissin’ and hand-shakin’ on the campaign trail, Congress is back this week and faces a daunting pile of procrastinated work. As any college student can attest, a last-minute cram session is usually not the most productive way to get something done, but when it’s all you got, you do what you can. And with only a few weeks before another extended pre-Election Day break, Congress needs to start cramming if it wants to reinvent itself as a proactive, go-getting group of lean, mean lawmaking machines.

Our hard-won experience is that a little effort, a lot of coffee, and some old-fashioned elbow grease can put a serious dent in even the biggest workload, so Taxpayers for Common Sense compiled a “top ten” list of issues that Congress should tackle in the next four weeks. Then it struck us that for a do-nothing Congress—the same Congress that stared Jack Abramoff in the face and couldn’t pass lobbying reform—ten seemed a little ambitious. So we made it simple, and reduced our requests to an easier to digest two.

To Do #1. Congress needs to institute earmarking reform. We would like to see some clear-as-day, black-letter legislation that would, at the minimum, require every earmark in every bill to have the requesting lawmaker’s name next to it. There have been too many questions raised about the unethical use of earmarks to allow this process to continue in secrecy. And, like take-home exam questions, all legislation needs to be available to taxpayers via the internet 72 hours before a vote so lawmakers and the public know what is being voted on.

We know that a heavy dose of sunshine is the best disinfectant, and the murky process of earmarking needs a thorough cleaning. Though fuller disclosure would surely reduce the overall number of earmarks, bad earmarks would inevitably make it into a bill occasionally, so we need a provision to enable members to challenge individual earmarks through a budgetary point of order. The challenged earmark would need 60 votes to survive, making it tougher for future “bridges to nowhere” to make it through. This would also help ensure that earmarked funds are going to the most worthy projects.

If Congress doesn’t want the extra-credit for passing legislation on its own or as part of a larger lobby reform package, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), along with House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-CA), recently pledged to institute changes to the House rules that would bring some level of sanity to earmarking. We’ve also heard similar rumblings from Senate Majority Leader Frist (R-TN). So we say it’s time to get cracking, since in this Congress of diminished expectations, rule changes would be better than no reform at all.

To Do #2. The second item on our wish list is a definite long-shot, like the guys from Animal House making it on the Dean’s list. The Constitution gives Congress only one annual task—to pass the nation’s spending bills to fund everything from fighter jets to office supplies—so we’d love to see this Congress get its real work done before diving into pre-election issues aimed primarily at firing up their bases. Unfortunately, we may see only a couple of spending bills completed by the end of September, meaning that a “lame duck” Congress will have to return after the election for a dose of summer school in order to pass a massive omnibus spending bill, the Frankenstein of legislation. This monster would be nine or so spending bills squeezed into one huge piece of legislation, with more than 10,000 earmarks and hundreds of billions in spending.

Like any last-minute cram session, there are things sure to be missed. We’d love to see a transparent federal contracts and grants database enacted, as proposed by Sens. Coburn (R-OK) and Obama (D-IL) and real reform of the $24 billion in-the-red flood insurance program this year. But this Congress hasn’t exactly been a legislative ball of fire, so we’d be pleasantly surprised if they can knock these two modest items off the “to do” list before they adjourn at the end of September.

For more information, contact Steve Ellis at (202)-546-8500 ext. 126 or email