DESPITE NEW RULE, CONGRESS STILL EXPECTED TO PORK OUT PET PROJECTS PART OF POLITICS.

Byline: LISA FRIEDMAN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The clarion call from Capitol Hill last week heralded a new era of ethics and candor as politicians vowed truthfulness and transparency, especially in their funding decisions.

But if history is any judge, it's unlikely that Congress truly has voluntarily relinquished the time-honored political tradition of tucking money for pet projects into spending bills.

``I'm inclined to believe that sooner or later, the loopholes will emerge. They're (members of Congress) almost all lawyers, after all,'' predicted University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.

``They're good at finding ways around the rules.''

Others agreed that change doesn't come easily in the nation's capital.

``It's written into their DNA,'' agreed congressional scholar Norman Ornstein.

History is replete with politicians who have stealthily included pork in massive appropriations tomes -- from $20,000 to cover Mary Todd Lincoln's redecorating debts to $25 million in 1992 for a supercomputer in Alaska.

President Andrew Jackson, who served from 1829 to 1837, famously vetoed the use of $150,000 to build a road between Maysville and Lexington, Ky.

Though Jackson called the expenditure unconstitutional because it concerned only Kentucky, folks from the Bluegrass State considered the 1830 Maysville Veto a way for Jackson to obstruct political rival Henry Clay's journey to D.C.

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells the tale of Mary Todd Lincoln in ``Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.''

Deeply in debt after a White House redecorating whirlwind, the first lady asked her husband to allocate more money to cover renovations.

A furious President Lincoln, consumed with providing for Union soldiers in the 1860s, refused. So she turned to the Commissioner of Public Buildings who, Kearns Goodwin says, turned to Congress with winning results.

``He succeeded in convincing a friendly congressman to hide a deficiency appropriation in a complex list of military appropriations,'' she wrote.

The 19th century also saw railroad construction as a major source of pork-barrel spending, said Boston University history professor Julian Zelizer.

``Legislators clamored to direct money toward their districts,'' Zelizer said, noting that Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois convinced party leaders to direct federal subsidies to his state for a rail system linking the South with the West to create the ``great national thoroughfare.''

``Routes were routinely fought over in this decade so money would go to (lawmakers') states,'' Zelizer said.

The pork phenomenon known as ``earmarking'' -- in which lawmakers put markers in bills to decide where federal money should be spent -- proliferated in the 1980s, historians said.

According to Citizens Against Government Waste, pork-barrel spending has grown from 546 projects costing about $3.1 billion in 1991 to 8,963 projects last year.

The total for that fat? About $29 billion, the watchdog group estimates.

Along the way, Congress spent $400,000 for a teapot museum in North Carolina; $1.5 million for an iron-cast statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire; and $25 million for a supercomputer in Fairbanks, Alaska, that Sen. Ted Stevens once said was supposed to harness the aurora to generate electricity. An Alabama senator quietly doubled the scope of a federal dredging project around his riverbank home.

And in 1997, according to Citizens Against Government Waste, an aide to an Illinois senator who was stopped by police in Washington, D.C., for walking his dog without a leash decided to get his revenge legislatively. Unbenownst to the senator, the aide ``got language added to a House appropriations bill ordering the National Park Service to build a dog run at the park `as expeditiously as possible.'''

That earmark was later removed.

And, of course, there is the famous ``bridge to nowhere'' -- a $225 million authorization to connect an Alaska town of 14,000 to an island of 50 people.

That provision -- more than anything -- led to the tougher standards Congress set to hold itself by.

And while watchdogs and historians universally praise the new rules as a vast improvement, they say they are realistic about the future.

``Everyone wants to cut spending, except their spending,'' Zelizer said. Transparency, he said, ``is key in allowing constituents to see who is giving money to whom.''

But, Zelizer added, ``the pressures on legislators to bring home the pork remain as strong as ever, so we should expect the earmarks to continue.''

lisa.friedman(at)langnews.com

[phone]