Pork busters, and keepers: a telling fight among Republicans.

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.

Reforms like these would not have been possible just a few years ago, but the runaway spending of the last five years has energized House conservatives. In the election to replace Tom DeLay as majority leader, these conservatives elevated Ohio's John Boehner; having voiced commitment to budget reforms during his campaign, Boehner seemed like a leader the RSC could work with after years of frustration.

As members began to negotiate the budget, modest reform looked possible. The leadership agreed to put a "rainy-day fund" into the budget and to require that spending over that limit get a separate vote. "We found ourselves in the unfamiliar position of being in agreement with the leadership," says a senior Hill staffer close to the RSC. Conservative Republicans agreed to smaller spending cuts than they would have preferred, but moderate Republicans also compromised--dropping their demand for $7 billion in additional health and education spending. Overall, the budget resolution held discretionary spending under the president's $873 billion cap.

But then the Appropriations chairman, Jerry Lewis of California, blew the whole thing out of the water. Once he found out about the reforms--especially the limits on emergency spending--he had one of his staffers fire off an angry e-mail to the other members of the Appropriations Committee, urging them to oppose the bill. The e-mail, leaked to the National Taxpayers Union, said: "As you know, the Budget Resolution contains a so-called 'Rainy Day Fund' that would REQUIRE the Budget Committee to approve non-defense related emergency spending in excess of the amount stated within the Budget Resolution ... Chairman Lewis has instructed us to inform you that, unless the Rainy Day Fund and this new Point of Order are dropped/not included through action of the Rules Committee tonight, he will NOTSUPPORT passage of the RULE and/or the BUDGET RESOLUTION tomorrow. He also requested that you inform your Subcommittee Chairman of his position in this regard and asks that they likewise support the Committee."

According to National Journal's CongressDaily, a sufficient number of Republicans on Lewis's committee took his advice and opposed the bill. This gave cover to some moderate Republicans who weren't comfortable with the budget's fiscal restraint, and the Democrats had already indicated that they would vote together to hand the Republicans a defeat. When House leaders counted votes and realized they were short, they decided to postpone the vote until after the Easter recess.

Appearing on ABC's This Week, Boehner placed the blame squarely on Lewis and the appropriators. But instead of getting into the complicated subject of emergency spending--the subject of Lewis's angry e-mail--Boehner cleverly put the focus on another reason Lewis gave for opposing the deal: a rule change that would reform the practice of earmarking money for pork. The Appropriations Committee controls the earmarking process; it gets over 35,000 requests for earmarks a year. The new rules would make it easier for members to object to especially egregious earmarks.

Earmark reform is now a hot topic: The online Porkbusters movement has raised awareness of it; the Senate has passed a version of earmark reform; President Bush even addressed the issue in his State of the Union. Boehner is turning up the pressure at exactly the right time. But he and Speaker Dennis Hastert need to do more if they want to revive this budget. They need to use their power on the House GOP Steering Committee--which hands out committee assignments--as leverage against Lewis: He needs to know that his chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee is at stake.

For conservatives, this isn't about the RSC vs. the appropriators anymore. It's about the leaders vs. the appropriators, and whether the former have the political foresight to realize that their jobs depend on their ability to restore values and discipline to the Republican majority. They should begin by upholding some semblance of fiscal sanity--passing some modest budget reforms and holding the line against those Republicans who think they can stay in the majority by outspending the Democrats.

Mr. Spruiell writes the media blog for National Review Online.