PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The House is doing better than the Senate:

As Democrats attempt to curb criticism of the earmarking process, the House is leading in one area: reducing the cost of lawmakers’ pet projects in the annual appropriations bills.

But the House’s reduction in spending on earmarking by at least 50 percent from fiscal 2006 levels has some members worried. They are concerned that they will head into conference negotiations with the Senate at a disadvantage because that chamber’s spending bills will contain many more earmarks from the start.

“It’s going to be a House-Senate battle,” said House appropriator Sam Farr, D-Calif. . . .

House appropriators have long complained that the Senate tries to squeeze more earmarks into its spending bills.

“When we were in the majority, we used to say the Democrats are the opposition and the Senate is the enemy,” Rep. James T. Walsh, R-N.Y., recently said with a grin. Walsh is a veteran appropriator and ranking member of the Labor-HHS-Education panel.

This year the House and Senate earmark gap has grown. “What you are seeing this year is the discrepancy is enhanced,” said Jim Dyer, a former GOP staff director of the House Appropriations Committee.

The Senate GOP leadership remains lame, too:

Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) speedy ascension to de facto leader of the Senate’s conservatives may have won him a number of fans among fiscal hawks, reform-minded watchdogs and some fellow Republican Senators, who applaud the first-term Senator for his willingness to buck the chamber’s “Old Boy” traditions. But DeMint’s tactics have started to chafe GOP leaders and prompted private warnings that their tolerance has worn thin. . . .

His ongoing fight with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) over earmarks reforms, has begun to irritate Republican Senate elders, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Minority Whip Trent Lott (Miss.).According to several Republicans, party leaders have made it clear to DeMint that while they may give him some running room over the next few appropriations-laden weeks, they will not tolerate what they see as repeated efforts to hijack the Senate floor and the public spotlight.

DeMint declined to comment directly on any warning leadership may have delivered to him regarding his increasingly high-profile crusades. But he did say it is up to McConnell and other GOP leaders to take up the mantle of reform if they do not want others to do so.

The entire GOP leadership should be doing this sort of thing, instead of being upstaged by a freshman Senator and then grousing about it.