It’s great to be here with John McCain, who I’ve been proud to work with on so many reform issues over the years, including earmark reform.  Senator McCaskill, though newer to the Senate, she has been one of the most effective advocates of earmark reform since she took office.  In fact when I met her a couple years ago I said, ‘Hi I’m Senator Feingold’ and she said, ‘Hi I’m against earmarks’, that is essentially her commitment to this.  And since arriving in the Senate, earmarks have had no greater foe than Senator Coburn.  I’m also pleased to say that my colleague and friend Lindsey Graham is an original cosponsor of the bill.  

In the last Congress, we passed the Honest Leadership in Government Act, which was the most significant earmark reform that Congress has ever enacted.  That bill marked a growing recognition by Members that the business-as-usual days of using earmarks to avoid the scrutiny of the authorizing process or of competitive grants are coming to an end.  It is no accident that the presidential nominees of the two major parties were major players on that reform package.

The Lobbying and Ethics Reform bill was a significant step forward, although I know some of my colleagues felt it didn’t do enough to address earmarks.  And of course I agreed with that.  But we all agree that more reform is needed. The Fiscal Discipline, Earmark Reform, and Accountability Act of 2009 – S.162 - will build on that achievement.  It’s time to move from what has largely been a system designed to dissuade the use of earmarks through disclosure to one that actually makes it harder to enact them in the first place.   

The principal provision of this measure is a ban on unauthorized earmarks on appropriations bills.  So the way that it will work under our bill, any unauthorized earmark is subject to a point of order.  To overcome the point of order, and keep that earmark in the bill, supporters of the unauthorized earmark will have to obtain the super-majority of the Senate, 60 votes.  And to make it even tougher, the bill provides that any earmarked funding which is successfully stricken from the appropriations bill will be unavailable for any other spending in the bill.  So it will actually reduce the appropriation bill and this is kind of similar to the super majority requirement that we have in the pay-go legislation, where you can still do something without paying for it, but you have to get a super majority, you’ve got to get 60 votes in order to do that. 

The measure also closes a loophole in last year’s Lobbying and Ethics Reform bill by requiring all appropriations conference reports and all authorizing conference reports to be electronically searchable 48 hours before the Senate considers the conference report.  And it requires all recipients of federal funds to disclose any money spent on registered lobbyists.

Now I applaud President-Elect Obama’s announcement that the expected economic recovery bill should be kept free of earmarks.  I couldn’t agree more, and the best way to keep that bill and other spending bills free of earmarks is to pass the reforms we are proposing.  That is why we intend to offer these reforms as an amendment to the economic recovery bill.  It’s not enough to keep earmarks out of just one bill – we should try to eliminate them, period.

With the economic challenges we face, it’s more important than ever that we enact tough earmark reform that reins in wasteful spending.  I look forward to working with my colleagues here today, and other colleagues from both parties, to pass this bill.  I’m pleased to announce too that in a surprise move Senator Lieberman has agreed to join with John McCain in cosponsoring our bill as well, so it is a tri-partisan bill.