Good theater on the House floor today (if you’re a geek like me). Before getting to the substance, I thought I would comment on a nearly interesting turn of events. In addition to the normal votes on motions to reconsider and points of order, Rep. McHenry asked for a vote “by divisi.png”, which got ignored by the Chair. Crack TCS staff researched what  voting by division is, and it is a parliamentary mechanism which requires members to literally rise to be counted for the yeas and nays. That would be some interesting theater on C-span – I guess it would sort of look like the state of the union, people jumping up and down.

Now on the substance. The spending bill that passed the house today – I call it a spending bill because it isn’t a true continuing resolution, which would be a few pages, and it isn’t an omnibus which would be a 1,000. There was a lot of debate about whether there are earmarks in the bill or not. I’m confident that over the coming days we will find a good number of earmarks enacted by this bill. Let’s be clear, the Democrats didn’t add earmarks, but the underlying FY06 spending bills this legislation is based on were full of them. According to the CRS, there were 13,012 earmarks in the FY06 spending bills. Now most of them were in the report language accompanying the bills, which as restated by Sec. 112 of H.J. Res 20 (the spending bill) don’t have the force of law. But that section was little more than placebo, earmarks in reports never had the force of law. But some of the thousands of earmarks in the FY06 spending bills were in the legislative language. It appears that the Democrats generally tried to excise these earmarks, but I have to believe that some of them remained. There is still rot in this spending bill. We will spend the next couple days looking for it.

Finally, before anyone writes the eulogy on FY07 earmarks, remember there were more than 2,700 earmarks in the FY07 Defense spending bill.