Pork busters, and keepers: a telling fight among Republicans.(United States spendings)

AT the eleventh hour, House Republicans failed to pass a budget resolution before leaving for a two-week break. A tenuous deal between fiscal conservatives and the House leadership collapsed when big-spending Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee threatened to torpedo the bill on the floor. Most budget fights are over line items, but this one is over a bigger issue: Congress's power to spend money. When conservatives proposed some reforms to curtail that power, Republican appropriators shut down the negotiations.

Like a collapsing civilization, the GOP majority seems unable to uphold the values that lifted it to prominence. Republicans who seek to regain the trust of fiscal conservatives through spending cuts are losing ground to appropriators and moderates who want to spend their way out of their political problems. Unless the House leadership brings the big spenders under control, the Republican party that took over in 1994 will continue to disappear.

The road to the current impasse starts in New Orleans. Fiscal conservatives, led by Indiana congressman Mike Pence's Republican Study Committee (RSC), started campaigning relentlessly for spending cuts when Hurricane Katrina precipitated a spree of federal pork disguised as emergency relief. Shortly after Katrina struck, Congress hastily appropriated over $10 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for disaster relief. A week later, President Bush asked for--and Congress approved--over $50 billion more.

This extravagance alarmed the RSC, but few members would vote against such politically sensitive emergency bills, so Pence and his group came up with another plan. They drew up a list of unnecessary, wasteful, or redundant government programs that could be cut in order to pay for Katrina relief, held a series of press events, and called their effort "Operation Offset." These conservatives were rebuffed, however, when they brought their ideas to the Republican leadership. Then-House majority leader Tom DeLay said there weren't any offsets in the budget because, as he infamously told the Washington Times, "after 11 years of Republican majority we've pared it down pretty good."

The RSC eventually convinced the leadership to support modest spending cuts in the budget-reconciliation bill last February, but the $39 billion in savings fell far short of offsetting the Katrina spending. In addition, the RSC's fears that the billions appropriated for hurricane relief would be vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse proved well-founded. The Washington Post reported that FEMA had squandered 60 percent of the $10 billion from the first emergency bill on a wasteful mobile-home program that benefited only 10 percent of the households affected by Katrina, while 80 percent of the households were helped through rental assistance at a third of the cost.

Which brings us to the current budget resolution. After the Katrina mess, fiscal conservatives pledged to fix the broken system that allows Congress to appropriate vast sums of emergency dollars with little or no oversight. First, conservatives want to define "emergency": Hurricane Katrina was a true emergency, but Congress often uses "emergency supplementals" as a way to circumvent the budget process. For instance, Congress has funded the war in Iraq as an emergency supplemental ever since it began. Because of the urgency of supplying our troops, these are must-pass bills--and their status as such leads members to load them up with pork. In the Iraq supplemental currently before the Senate, the Heritage Foundation found $4 billion in farm bailouts and $700 million to reroute a rail line. To put an end to this, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has drafted legislation defining emergencies as "sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary."

Hurricanes would meet all of these criteria, so conservatives have proposed another reform to govern such real emergencies, so that Congress won't exploit them to give away money with too little oversight. Ryan's legislation demands that each year Congress include a certain amount of emergency spending in the budget. Emergency spending in excess of that "rainy-day fund" would have to go to the House Budget Committee for a vote.