No sooner did Jack Abramoff leave the federal court house a felon than Congress started talking about “reform” of the lobbying process. Senator McCain proposes to step up disclosure requirements on lobbyists while also expanding the number of groups and individuals who must file disclosures and increasing the amount of time Hill staffers, Congressmen, and administration officials must “cool off” between their government service and lucrative careers in the private sector.

This rush to “reform” strikes us as full of potential to interfere with the bedrock right to petition the government. Better to focus on all the pork these lobbyists are so often eyeing. There’s certainly a lot of it, as the nearby chart illuminates. Under a Republican Congress, the number of earmarks – individual projects inserted by members of Congress that are not requested by the administration or part of an established program – has grown faster than a suckling piglet, to 13,997 in 2005 from 1,439.The more recent number includes 6,000 earmarks in a single highway bill, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. In 2005, Congress doled out $27.3 billion in pork, nearly three times the $10 billion it dished out in 1995.

Banning pork is not a desirable permanent, or even temporary, solution to this explosion. Earmarks can be an effective way for legislators to circumvent inefficient and unaccountable executive branch bureaucracies to meet legitimate needs in their districts. But the key word here is “legitimate.” Right now, Congress essentially operates on an honor system. Members can insert just about any spending provision they can think of into committee and conference reports, at all hours of the night, with or without publishing the details for their colleagues to read and consider before everyone casts a vote for a behemoth “must-pass” bill.

Often these earmarks are not even printed in the text of a spending bill itself; one must instead comb through piles of legislative litter to locate them. Abramoff was heard to refer to the appropriations committees as a “favor factory” because the process provided so many opportunities for him to ply his trade. But there is no honor among thieves, and since honor isn’t working, shame is the next best thing.

Rep. Jeff Flake, a Republican of Arizona, and Mr. McCain have introduced bills in both chambers that would bar agencies from writing a check for any earmark that is not printed in the text of an appropriation bill. The bill would also change procedural rules to make it easier for Congressmen to challenge individual spending provisions on the floor. The theory is that by increasing the likelihood that fiscal hawks such as Mr. McCain or the House Republican Study Committee – of which Mr. Flake is a member – will quickly unmask embarrassing boondoggles, the new rules would discourage shenanigans and catch offenders.

The Abramoff scandal is so entertaining, at least for those of us who aren’t Republican Hill staffers, precisely because in a fell swoop it’s lifting the veil on all sorts of spending abuses. The key to preventing such a scandal in the future will be to keep that veil from descending again and to take away the pork. This strikes us as true lobbying reform, as opposed to the simplistic lobbying “reform” that would just dilute the First Amendment.