PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: John Fund says it’s time for Bush to step up:

Just before Christmas, Congress sent Mr. Bush a $516 billion omnibus spending bill stuffed with 8,993 special-interest earmarks. To make matters worse, most of the earmarks aren’t even in the language of the law itself. They were slipped into a 900-page “committee report” that represented the wish-lists of the Senate and House appropriations committees. Almost no one got a chance to read that report before the budget was passed late at night and with barely a day for members to review it.

Mr. Bush agreed to sign the budget but said he was disappointed at Congress’s failure to overcome its earmark addiction. He announced he was asking his budget director, Jim Nussle, “to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill.”

What Mr. Bush knows, and Congress doesn’t want the taxpayers to know, is that the vast majority of the offending earmarks–the ones that aren’t part of the actual budget law and were instead “air-dropped” into the committee report–aren’t legally binding. A Dec. 18 legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service found that most of the committee reports have not been formally passed by both houses and “presented” to the President for signing, and thus have not become law. “President Bush could ignore the 90% of earmarks that never make it to the floor of the House or Senate for a vote,” says Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who has read the CRS report. “He doesn’t need a line-item veto.”

Will he have the guts to do anything?