The Dems' pork hiding scheme

Robert Novak:

WHEN Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went home following his staged all-night session last week, he saved from embarrassment one member of his Democratic caucus: Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Reform Republican Sen. Tom Coburn had ready a Defense authorization bill amendment to remove Nelson's earmark funding a Nebraska company whose officials include Nelson's son. Such an effort became impossible when Reid pulled down the bill.

That Reid's action would have this effect was mere coincidence. He knew that Sen. Carl Levin's amendment to the Defense bill mandating a troop withdrawal from Iraq would fall short of the 60 senators needed to cut off debate, and planned from the start to pull the bill after the all-night debate, designed to satisfy anti-war zealots, finished. But Reid also is working behind the scenes with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to undermine transparency of earmarks and prevent open debate on spending proposals such as Nelson's.

These antics fit the decline of the Senate, including an unwritten rules change requiring 60 votes (out of 100) to pass any meaningful bill. When I arrived on Capitol Hill 50 years ago, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (like Reid today) confronted a slim Democratic Senate majority and a GOP president but was not burdened with the 60-vote rule. While Johnson used chicanery, Reid resorts to brute force that shatters the Senate's facade of civilized discourse. Reid is plotting to strip anti-earmark transparency from the final version of ethics legislation passed by both the Senate and House, with tacit support from Republican senators and the GOP leadership.

At stake is the fate of Coburn's "Reid Amendment" previously passed by the Senate - so-called because it would bar earmarks benefiting a senator's family members such as Reid's four lobbyist sons and son-in-law. Nelson's current $7.5 million earmark for software helps 21st Century Systems Inc. (21 CSI), which employs the senator's son, Patrick Nelson, as its marketing director.

21 CSI gets 80 percent of its funds from federal grants, mostly from earmarks. With nine offices scattered among states that are represented by appropriators in Congress, the company in recent years has spent $1.1 million to lobby Congress and $160,000 in congressional campaign contributions. "As of April," the Omaha World-Herald reported, "only one piece of [21 CSI] software has been used - to help guard a single Marine camp in Iraq - and it was no longer in use."

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In his six and one-half months as majority leader, Reid has tended to suppress free expression in the Senate. He last week cut off an attempt to respond to him by Sen. Arlen Specter, the moderate Republican, in an abrupt way that I had not witnessed in a half-century of Senate-watching. Neither had Specter. When he finally got the Senate floor, he declared: "Nothing is done here until the majority leader decides to exercise his power to keep the Senate in all night on a meaningless, insulting session. . . . Last night's performance made us the laughingstock of the world." It may get worse if plans to eviscerate ethics legislation are pursued.

Reid may have done the impossible. Make Senators stop talking. But he can only use his imperious powers so often before he will be challenged in ways that he cannot avoid. He is a sellout to the MoveOn,org loser lobby, and there have been allegations that he is a sell out on some real estate deals in Nevada. He si a terrible Senator and Majority Leader. In the meantime, Sen. Coburn is the real deal when it comes to a politician with integrity. He deserves support in his battle against the earmark scams of people like Nebraska Sen. Nelson.