A fiercely partisan impasse in the House was resolved on June 14 when Appropriations Chair David Obey (D-WI) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) reached a comprehensive procedural agreement following months of confusion and vituperation over the chamber's earmarks disclosure and approval process. The agreement outlines rules for consideration of earmarks for the House to follow for each of the 12 FY 2008 appropriations bills and appears to be operating smoothly thus far: on June 21, the House Appropriations Committee approved the lists of earmarks for two spending bills by voice votes. In late May, Obey announced he would ignore the January reforms adopted by the House requiring that earmarks and their sponsors be identified in spending bills when they are introduced. Instead, he said he would delay inserting earmarks into spending bills until conference, when they can no longer be removed from the bills by amendment. Obey argued he needed several months to vet and sign off personally on over 32,000 earmarks requests, after which point full review on the House floor of the earmarks he approved would be impractical and unnecessary. Obey's decision and reasoning set off a furious reaction among House Republicans and advocacy groups who argued such a procedure effectively insulated earmarks from any meaningful legislative review, a reversal of practice in the 109th and earlier GOP-dominated Houses and quite contrary to Democratic pledges to bring transparency to the House. National media outlets covered the issue, the New York Times alone writing three stories on it in the space of a week. After two weeks in which Obey was subject to increasingly intense criticism and changed his position a couple of times — consenting to publish earmarks during the August recess but not allow them to be amended or removed — he and Boehner entered discussions on procedures that would quell the tempest. Within 48 hours, after the House GOP leadership prematurely announced a deal at a press conference, the Democratic leadership confirmed the following agreement:

• Homeland Security: No earmarks will be included in this bill.
• Military Construction-VA: No earmarks will be included in this bill until conference, but challenges to earmarks added to the bill during conference negotiations will be permitted.
• Energy-Water: No earmarks have been included in this bill, but the House will incorporate a package of earmarks prior to a vote on the floor.
• Financial Services: The bill, already adopted by the Appropriations Committee without earmarks on June 11, was remanded to the committee and marked-up with earmarks added on June 21.
• Interior-Environment: The bill, adopted by the Appropriations Committee without earmarks on June 11, will be accompanied by a supplemental report detailing specific earmarks.
• The remaining seven bills: Earmarks, if any, will be included in these bills when they reach the House floor and, therefore, subject to amendment.

On June 18, the House formally approved these new earmarks procedures, permitting points of order on any appropriations conference reports containing earmarks added during conference. After only twenty minutes of debate following such a point of order, the House will vote on whether to consider the conference report in an up-or-down vote. The rule only applies to spending, not tax earmarks; it also requires earmark sponsors to certify that they have no financial interest in a project. Three days later on June 21, the Appropriations Committee took up the Financial Services bill with earmarks included and the Interior-Environment supplemental report consisting of earmarks for that bill, adopting both by non-contentious voice votes. The two bills are scheduled for floor votes the week of June 25. The earmarks provisions in these bills comprise small fractions of the total spending approved. The $21 billion Financial Services bill now includes $33.7 million in earmarks; the Interior-Environment supplemental report earmarked $119 million of its overall $27 billion in spending. It should be noted this is not additional spending, but merely specific instructions about how to spend money already included in the bills. The harsh rhetoric in the House earlier this month seems long-forgotten. The practical fallout from the earmarks battle may be that House Democrats have scaled back their ambitious goal of passing 11 of the 12 FY 2008 spending bills by the July Fourth recess. But the bitterness of the debate both in and outside of Congress also serves as a reminder of the powerful resonance that remains with transparency and accountability issues linked to the several scandals that plagued the House starting in early 2006 with Jack Abramoff, through the Duke Cunningham episode, and continue to the present with the recent indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA).