Repeat: “may.” Congress has an impressive talent at somehow managing to find new and exciting ways to spend your money.

Senate bogs down over $410 billion spending bill

WASHINGTON – The Senate, tied up in a fight over a huge omnibus appropriations bill, will have to pass a stopgap spending measure Friday in order to avoid a partial government shutdown.

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The huge, 1,132-page spending bill awards big increases to domestic programs and is stuffed with pet projects sought by lawmakers in both parties. The measure has an extraordinary reach, wrapping together nine spending bills to fund the annual operating budgets of every Cabinet department except for Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs.

The measure was written mostly over the course of last year, before projected deficits quadrupled and Obama’s economic recovery bill left many of the same spending accounts swimming in cash.

And, to the embarrassment of Obama — who promised during last year’s campaign to force Congress to curb its pork-barrel ways — the bill contains 7,991 pet projects totaling $5.5 billion, according to calculations by the GOP staff of the House Appropriations Committee.

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As you know, it’s in response to the PMA meltdown/outrage (see here for some background posts):

Rep. Flake targets earmarks amidst PMA controversy
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), the House’s most vocal critic of pork barrel spending, is trying to shake the ethics committee into action on the link between earmarks and campaign contributors.

Flake has seized on the public corruption investigation of PMA Group, a once-powerful lobbying force that has disintegrated in the wake of an FBI probe into fraudulent campaign donations to numerous members of Congress.

In the past 24 hours, Flake has highlighted earmarks in the omnibus appropriations bill for PMA clients, written a scathing op-ed to The New York Times about Congress’s pay-to-play practices and offered a privileged resolution on the House floor that would force the House ethics panel to scrutinize the connection between earmarks and campaign cash and report back to the full body in two months.

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From ABC News:

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reports:  The House Appropriations Committee just posted its $410 billion 2009 Omnibus spending bill.  It’s a doozy.  This is the bill that will fund the government’s operations until the end of the fiscal year.  It’s larded with thousands (so many, I can’t count them all yet) of earmarks and adds up an increase in overall discretionary spending of more than 8 percent, the biggest one year increase since 1978 (with the exception of the spending boost after the September 11 attacks).

And this is a bi-partisan feeding frenzy.  Roughly 40 percent of the money for earmarks (i.e. pet projects inserted by individual lawmakers) have been inserted by Republicans.

The Democrats, back before 2006, blamed the GOP constantly for major increases in discretionary spending. Now it is their turn and it turns out they are worse. 60% of increases by them. Wow.

Tonight, Barack Obama will address the nation. His aides, setting the bar extraordinarily high, say the speech will be Reaganesque.

“The president believes very clearly that we have to be honest with the American people about where we are,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“He will,” Gibbs said, “tell the country that we’ve faced … greater challenges than the ones we face now, but we as Americans always meet those challenges. But in the Reaganesque words, there are always better days ahead.”

Will the President dare to take on the issue of discretionary spending? Will he dare to challenge the Democrats?

I suspect this is the perfect opportunity for him to do so. The Dems are giving him a huge gift, i. e. a massive pig with a target on its rib cage for Obama to blow up and take on the corrupting culture of Washington.

This should, in fact, be the bar tonight. If Obama is willing to take this on, we’ll need to give him credit. If he does not, not only will he not have been “honest with the American people,” but he will not really be setting us up to meet any challenges.