Now it is clear why the drafters of the energy bill were in such a hurry to have it passed, though only a few members of Congress had seen or known what was in it. The bill, fortunately delayed by the Senate, is not unique in its abundance of special interest spending, but it makes an ambitious attempt to be the champion of them.

To put the energy spending in context, begin with a deficit moving toward the multi-trillion dollar level and government spending growing at 12 percent a year. Partly, this is the result of one party – it doesn’t matter which one – controlling the House, Senate and White House. Their friends are rewarded, although in the case of the energy bill, the biggest friend is bipartisan. Ethanol is the largest recipient of federal subsidy. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that it will cost taxpayers $2 billion over the next five years. By far the largest producer of ethanol is Archer Daniels Midland, which has received billions of dollars in subsidies over the years and is seeking billions more, according to Sen. John McCain, for a product that is not needed and is surpassed environmentally by other reformulated gasolines.

Sen. McCain joined Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe in supporting a filibuster to delay or defeat passage of the bill. The filibuster’s success should give others in the Senate time to consider the favors the bill provides to such projects as a coal-gasification plant in Minnesota ($800 million), the makers of MTBE (product-liability waiver that will cost the public billions) and a uranium-processing facility (which Time magazine says has links to Iraq and North Korea that could cost far more).

The Medicare bill reportedly has similar abuses of lawmaking, and it has already passed Congress and been embraced by the White House. The big winner there, clearly enough, was the pharmaceutical industry, which got billion of dollars in federal spending on prescription drugs for seniors but largely prevented the government from negotiating lower prices for those drugs, as it does in its drug programs for veterans and the poor. The Medicare bill further provides about $80 billion to corporations to keep them from dropping retiree drug benefits, though the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 20 percent of seniors will be dropped anyway.

The public should be especially concerned about this costly pattern because Congress still has before it a huge spending bill, an omnibus bill that includes the budgets of 14 departments and $390 billion in spending, that should have been passed before the new budget year, which began Oct. 1. The spending equals about one-sixth of the federal budget and covers so many essential agencies that members of Congress will have a hard time voting against it. Under such circumstances, it is guaranteed that congressional leadership has allowed needless spending that generously helps a tiny number of political campaign donors at the public’s expense.

This has turned out to be a particularly free-spending Congress, which is disappointing given the evaporation of the budget surplus, the cost of the war and the rising costs of existing entitlement programs.

The best chance for Congress to behave responsibly with tax dollars is to reject the secretive, rushed process that created the final energy and Medicare bills and pull apart the omnibus spending package to see just what it is requiring the public to purchase.