Ever since there has been a U.S. Congress, its legislators have been directing federal dollars to their states and districts.

They believe the spending helps the local economy–to say nothing of their re-election prospects. The longstanding practice has become so abusive, however, that some politicians are declaring themselves opposed to it. Their reforms vary from duplicitous to sincere, but sadly they all are only cosmetic.

Eagerly advertised to the voters back home as good news, the many sponsoring congressional Democrats and Republicans neglect to explain that they raided other parts of the defense budget to pay for the pork. Their favorite “bill payer” is the Pentagon’s Operation and Maintenance budget, which includes spending for weapons maintenance, training, fuel, and all the other essentials for fighting a war.

No one in Congress has done anything about it. The Senate’s self-proclaimed “pork buster,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, has given speech after speech listing pork in defense bills, but he has barely lifted a finger to take real parliamentary action. In an institution specifically designed to enable a minority, even of just one, to bring the whole body to gridlock unless he or she is accommodated, McCain has decided, instead, to appease the Senate’s most voracious porkers. These include fellow Republican Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Stevens’ Democratic colleague on the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Democrat Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii. McCain performs his role as pork enabler by giving his routinely brief “pork buster” speech and then simply sitting down or leaving the Senate chamber altogether.

If public exposure of pork could embarrass Congress out of its current abuse, the profligacy would have ended a long time ago. Since the mid-1990s, McCain has been giving his speeches identifying, even lampooning, thousands of outrageous examples in defense bills. The result? Congress increased the pork in those same bills from $4.2 billion in 1994 to the $9.3 billion in 2006.

If McCain intends to offer himself as a reasonable alternative [1] to the neo-con hawks and bible-thumpers controlling the Republikan Party — and [2] honestly cares to return the concept of fiscal responsibility to the Party which lies about doing so, every four years — I’d suggest he stay in the room one of these times and actively oppose some of the Pork.