A To-Do List for Congress

As Congress returns to Washington already chafing to get back to the home district for electioneering, here’s a reminder to make the short second half of the legislative session a productive one. Lawmakers need a fast start and some clenched-teeth bipartisanism to accomplish anything useful, including reversing some bad decisions that look even worse after a few weeks’ consideration.

The Senate should first strip the omnibus spending bill left over from 2003 of its most egregious pork-barrel provisions -- a record $23 billion worth.

Similarly, Congress ought to reverse the worst effects of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. The benefit, as structured, profits drug makers far more than the elderly. This could be fixed by explicitly allowing Medicare as a whole to bargain with drug companies to reduce prices. In addition, Congress should allow seniors to import drugs from Canada and other countries where they can be purchased more cheaply.

It isn’t just seniors that Congress needs to aid. Congress should resist pressure from teachers unions to weaken the accountability standards in the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal law that requires testing and higher achievement among all student groups in all the states. Also, the law will fail unless it is backed up with the kind of money President Bush was originally talking about giving troubled schools to help them improve student performance -- at least $5 billion more than they currently receive. Low-performing schools are almost invariably low-income schools with less-qualified teachers, weaker class offerings and fewer and older textbooks.

Congress also needs to ensure fairness in another area: Iraq reconstruction spending. Halliburton may have overcharged on fuel deliveries to Iraq. Now Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) state in a Dec. 18 letter to David J. Nash, director of the Iraq Program Management Office, that 26 cost-plus -- essentially open-ended -- contracts amounting to $18.7 billion are going to be awarded without full and open competition. News reports recently detailed how a Halliburton water-plant refurbishment soared in six weeks from an estimate of $76 million to $125 million, without apology. Unless Congress demands better oversight, taxpayers can expect more of the same.

Congress does have some bright lights that should be encouraged, particularly California’s moderate Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She is fresh from a successful compromise on forest protection and fire prevention and is off on another worthy bipartisan effort, this time with Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz). Their seaport security measure would create a cargo-container profiling plan that focuses inspections on high-risk cargo. In addition, Feinstein last April successfully proposed an amendment to give police and firefighters $109 million for communications systems, and she and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) pushed through a bill in May to improve air cargo security.

These are laws and proposals with heft and national usefulness. Compare them with the omnibus bill’s lavish appropriations for an indoor education rain forest in Coralville, Iowa, or for the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia. That should clarify a direction for lawmakers.