by Paul Jacob

We're going to find out who among our congressmen is being naughty, who nice.

Or, we will -- if Senator Tom Coburn has his way. Oddly, many of his colleagues don't seem to want to hop on board.

It's about the porkbarrel. It's about those secret last-minute additions to omnibus bills. It's about the earmarks that congressmen fling at special interests in exchange for campaign contributions. What if we knew more about these lines of the budget, and a lot faster than we do now?

That's what Coburn's bill would accomplish. It would require Congress to promptly post all the details about such lard in an easily searchable online database. With a few clicks of our computer keyboard we can find what we need, without having to wait for the Cato Institute or Citizens Against Government Waste to publish a research paper.

Coburn is a conservative porkbuster aiming to highlight waste and the quid pro quo earmarks that suck up your tax dollars. He's joined in his effort by a senator on the other side of the aisle, Barack Obama. Obama is not exactly a small-government man, but he has written against pork, and appears to be for open government.

We must stop the last-minute, back-room deals that politicians use to help the few at the expense of the rest of us.

Paul Jacob's "Common Sense" is published by Americans for Limited Government. Their website can be visited at www.limitedgov.org.