Two men whose names are synonymous with so-called reform in Washington, Senator McCain of Arizona and Senator Feingold of Wisconsin, have parted company over Congress’s latest stab at cleaning up its act.

The Senate voted yesterday 83–14 to approve legislation forcing the disclosure of earmarked expenditures in appropriations bills, requiring campaigns to pay more for the use of corporate jets and preventing departing senators from lobbying their former colleagues for two years.

Mr. Feingold stood as a key supporter of the ethics measure, but Mr. McCain denounced it in no uncertain terms.

“It’s one of the many shams that we have tried to inflict on the American people,” Mr. McCain said Wednesday as he addressed business leaders in Silicon Valley. “It’s a joke and it’s again going to contribute overtime, I think, to further abuse of your tax dollars and more cynicism on the part of the American people.”

By contrast, Mr. Feingold hailed the bill as a “landmark” that will deliver long overdue changes to the way Congress does business. “The bill before us is a very strong piece of reform legislation,” the Wisconsin Democrat said in remarks prepared for the Senate floor.

The schism between the two men relates largely to provisions in the bill dealing with special appropriations lawmakers seek to benefit programs or projects in their own districts. The bill aims to control the set-asides, known as earmarks, by requiring their disclosure 48 hours before a floor vote. The problem is that while the term earmark is common parlance in Washington, such provisions can be tricky to define.

Earlier this year, the Senate voted, 98–0, to give that responsibility to the body’s parliamentarian. However, that provision was dropped in yesterday’s bill and replaced with one that allows the majority leader and committee chairmen to identify earmarks.

Mr. McCain and other critics said that change hollowed out the proposed change by allowing powerful senators to hide earmarks at will. “It’s very much akin to putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” he told WBZ–AM. “It’s a travesty. … It wasn’t free meals that got members of Congress in jail, it was the abuse and corruption of the earmarks, and this is not a serious approach to it.”

Mr. Feingold rejected that assertion and called the proposed changes on earmarks “an enormous improvement.” “The minor changes that were made certainly do not justify a vote against cloture or against the bill,” he said.

Advocates of tighter ethics rules who have worked alongside Mr. McCain for years said they were puzzled by his action.

“I was really disappointed in McCain’s vote,” Meredith McGehee of the Campaign Legal Center said. “To say these earmark rules are a sham is, as a matter of policy, wrong.”

Ms. McGehee said it could be argued that it would be preferable to have “someone who can be held accountable,” such as a committee chairman or Senate leader, identify earmarks rather than an unelected Senate official. “I don’t think we have a clear answer on that yet,” she said.

Senator McCaskill of Missouri, a Democrat who won election last year in part due to ethics concerns, said she understood the objections to the earmarking proposal but didn’t see them as grounds to jettison the bill. “Would I have wished for a system, maybe, that is even more transparent than this? Yes. But this is major reform,” she said.

Ms. McCaskill said senators trying to hide earmarks under the new rules would ultimately be chagrined. “They’re going to get caught if they do that,” she said.

Mr. McCain also complained that the bill’s ban on purchasing meals for lawmakers was lax because lobbyists could still buy a meal as a gift to a legislator’s campaign.

Ms. McGehee said she was not too concerned about that concern, as any meals bought as campaign gifts would count toward a donor’s $4,600 maximum donation to a candidate. “Just because something doesn’t fix every problem doesn’t mean we don’t fix some problems,” she said.

The ethics bill, which passed the House on Tuesday, 411–8, will now proceed to President Bush. The White House has expressed concerns about some aspects of the measure, but Mr. Bush is expected to sign it. His approval could be viewed as a mere formality because the bill passed both chambers by veto-proof majorities.