Right about now, Senators Coburn, McCain, Feingold, Bayh, Kyl,Ensign, Graham, Sununu, DeMint, and Cornyn are formally announcing the Pork Barrel Reduction Act.

And right about now, the real fight against pork and for earmark reform is beginning. According to the sponsoring Senators, the bill does the following:

- Creates a new point of order against unauthorized earmarks and policy riders. This point of order allows for the elimination of extraneous individual earmarks and policy riders. Under this provision, only the offending provision would be removed from the appropriations bill or conference report if a point of order was sustained, thus maintaining the integrity of the underlying bill.

- Prohibits federal agencies from spending money on items and earmarks that were only included in unamendable committee or conference reports. This provision requires that all earmarks and spending items be in bill text, allowing for amendment and debate.

- Requires conference reports to be filed and publicly available for at least 48 hours prior to floor consideration. This requirement increases transparency and debate and gives lawmakers and the American public time to review legislation before it receives a vote.

- Strengthens current Senate rules against the conference report inclusion of matter not considered by the House or Senate. This provision prohibits consideration of conference reports containing matter not committed by either the House or Senate. Current rules allow for a point of order against reports with new matter, but many new provisions sneak by when they are attached to must-pass bills that can overcome the point of order.

- Requires full disclosure of any and all earmarks included in bills or conference reports. This provision shines some much needed light on the process by requiring a detailed description of all earmarks, including the identity of the lawmaker seeking the earmark and the earmark's essential governmental purpose.

- Requires recipients of federal dollars to disclose the amount of money that they spend on registered lobbyists. By increasing transparency and disclosure, this provision reduces the likelihood that taxpayers will unknowingly fund lobbyists who are promoting wasteful earmarks and working against the interests of hard-working taxpayers.

We will have the full text posted shortly, at which time I'd welcome more legal-minded folks' comments on the actual details of the bill.

It's time to bring some blog-pressure to bear in support of this effort, and so there is a new tracking page established to monitor which Senators are supporting, and which are obstructing, this much-needed reform. We need your help in contacting your Senators, getting their position, and reporting back to us on where they stand.

So please: make some phone calls, and if you are a blogger, link to this post and the tracking page, and ask your readers to do the same. The forces of business-as-usual pork-barrel politics are already on the march, and they will surely be fighting dirty to do everything they can to defeat this effort. Let's make sure they don't succeed...

Update: The full text of the bill is now available here (PDF).

Update II: The bill now has an identifying number: S.2265.