Informed Speculation

Robert Novak on the Senate Majority Leader:

Harry Reid last week basked in the adoration of the Democratic Party’s leading Senate reformers and its nine freshman senators. They extravagantly praised the new majority leader as the exemplar of ethical reform. But within 48 hours, Reid was opposing full transparency of earmarks. This week, Republican reformers will target Reid with an amendment to the Senate ethics package.

Sponsored by Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the proposal is called the “Reid amendment” because he inadvertently inspired it. Coburn would tighten loose anti-earmark restrictions in the ethics bill by prohibiting senators from requesting earmarks that financially benefit a senator, an immediate family member of a senator or a family member of a senator’s staffer.

The proposal follows the revelation that Reid’s four sons and his daughter’s husband all have been lawyers or lobbyists for special interests. While Reid has declared they are barred from lobbying for their clients in his office, there is little doubt they have taken advantage of their close proximity to a powerful senator.

An example are earmarks that have sent millions of federal dollars to the University of Nevada at Reno. Reid’s son-in-law, lawyer Steven Barringer, was a paid lobbyist for the university. In general, Republican reformers see Reid illustrating the nexus between legislators and special interests, in his case mainly real estate, gambling and mining.

,,,The “Reid amendment” is only part of a plan by Coburn and his fellow first-term Republican senator, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, to make sure that earmark reform is included in new ethical standards. Democratic efforts, particularly in the Senate, have concentrated on conduct of lobbyists and not members of Congress. Although the House version passed last week is stronger, the final compromise coming out of a Senate-House conference may barely touch the surface of earmarks.

The Senate version mandates transparency only for the few projects listed in legislation and not the accompanying reports. That would ignore up to 98 percent of the 12,852 earmarks in the last Congress. Reid launched his career as majority leader last Thursday with a furious fight to preserve this condition.

It will be business as usual in this Congress if Harry Reid gets his way, and as Majority Leader, he will certainly have a lot of influence.  It’s interesting to me that Harry Reid decried this transparency movement as being “a major change in the way the Senate works” – as if that isn’t precisely the point…