A decent proposal that has a long fight ahead to see passage: A federal Pork Barrel Commission to examine the budget before its final passage to ensure that its items are worthy of the money they will cost.

Proposed by Rep. Tom Andrews, the independent commission would be charged with reviewing the budget before the Appropriations Committee approved it and selecting spending items that were of purely local interest, had not been authorized by any committee, had not been subject to a hearing or had been included only as an attachment to another bill. In short: spending proposals snuck on to give the folks back home a reason to re-elect the incumbent.

After choosing the pork, the commission would hold public hearings on those spending proposals and ask their sponsors to defend them. They would then be held separately from the rest of the appropriations budget and voted on by Congress. The spending items should, of course, be voted on individually; together, they would make too tempting a proposal for too many members of Congress.

The need to haul hidden pork out of the budget is evident to anyone who has watched Congress pass again and again programs that have long since lost their usefulness, if they ever had any. The classic case of this was the mohair subsidy, killed in 1993, some three decades after it stopped having value but still cost about $170 million a year.

In 1960, 10 years after mohair was determined to be of value for making warm clothing for troops fighting in cold climates, Congress decided the program no longer was necessary. But with a little skillful lobbying, the farmers kept getting their subsidies through the 1960s, ’70s and 80s and would have kept getting them through the ’90s had not the public gotten wind of the deal from columnist George Will. After a prolonged public fight, Congress voted to kill the subsidy by 1995.

A commission like the one suggested by Rep. Andrews would, if successful, expose this type of spending and stop it long before it became a multi-generational burden. It would hold individual members of Congress responsible for that body’s spending habits. Great idea. Don’t look for it any time soon.