PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Andy Roth reports that Brian Bilbray has broken his word, voting for a bill full of secret earmarks after opposing them during his election:

Despite these strong words to clean up the earmark process, Bilbray promptly voted YES on the T-THUD appropriations bill yesterday, which contained over 1500 earmarks ($), most of which weren’t even in the final bill, but secretly hidden in committee reports.

Plus, he voted NO and NO and NO and NO on each of Jeff Flake’s anti-pork amendments.

Bilbray claims to be a fiscal conservative, but so far he’s off to a bad start.

Not very impressive in a guy who’s only been in office for a couple of days. But maybe he’ll do better, now that he realizes people are watching. If not, there’s another election in November.

Matthew Hoy is saying “I told you so.”

UPDATE: In the comments to Hoy’s post I see that some people in Bilbray’s district are talking about putting up a write-in candidate against him in November as a result of these shenanigans. Hope his office takes note.