If you told us earlier this year that just having earmarks in spending bills would make us happy, we would have thought that you were a few fries short of a Happy Meal, so to speak. But we had to fight hard this past week just to get the mere existence of spending bill earmarks disclosed.

Back in January, with much fanfare, the House of Representatives adopted earmark transparency rules that required members to disclose their earmarks and place their John Hancock right next to their pet project in the report that accompanies legislation.

After the rule change, it sometimes looked like Congress didn’t know what to do with the decision. The process of disclosure stumbled along. First we were told the Emergency Supplemental bill contained no earmarks – although there were provisions that met the House’s own definition of earmark. Next, two authorization committees released information on hundreds of earmarks in their bills. And now this month, when the spending bills starting coming out of the appropriations committee, the bills were presented with no earmarks at all. Lawmakers were being asked to vote up or down on the bill without knowing what earmarks would ultimately be included. Taxpayers were told that earmarks were being scrubbed by committee staff and would be made available after the spending bills had passed the House. The earmarks were a like watching a ship disappear into a fog bank, you know it’s there, but you can’t see it.

According to the appropriations staff who are supposed to steer these spending bills to final passage, they were drowning under an avalanche of 32,000 earmark requests. Considering Chairman Obey (D-WI) promised to halve the number of earmarks from previous years, they had to whittle that number down to around 7,000. They decided the spending show had to go on, and they were going to keep to their aggressive but arbitrary timeline to pass all but one of the spending bills before the 4th of July.

But in the last few weeks, that timeline was blown to smithereens. Backed by taxpayers outraged that they were going to be kept in the dark about special interest spending decisions, the House Republican minority tied the chamber in knots preventing the first bill – the Department of Homeland Security spending bill – from going forward. House leadership had planned on having four spending bills done by tonight. By this morning the House had passed none, zero, zilch.

Fortunately, Democratic leadership came back to their senses. It’s a complicated situation with different prescription for different bills, but the short version is that the half-baked spending bills are going back to committee to get fully cooked, and return with all the earmarks disclosed. Just like we were promised back in January.

In the end, the public is going to get their chance to see the earmarks, lawmakers can vote on them and as a bonus the rules are being strengthened to enable members to challenge any earmarks that airdropped into bills during conference with the Senate.

And it was good to see so many Republicans (including some habitual earmarkers) coming off the sidelines to support transparency efforts. We now expect them to vote for Rep. Jeff Flake’s (R-AZ) amendments to strike wasteful earmarks.

Now the Senate spending bills are starting to move and earmarks are being disclosed. So after a hiccup in the House, the transparency train slowly moves forward. Stay tuned to our website as we do our best to list the thousands of earmarks and their sponsors that Congress will be voting on in the next few months.