One of the more interesting fights of the First Gingrich Congress was the effort by House freshmen to restrict lobbying by non-profit groups (many more of them liberal than conservative) that receive federal grants. The idea behind the McIntosh-Istook amendment was that the $ 39 billion in federal grants given each year to non-profits freed up other money in the groups' budgets for lobbying. Economists call this fungibility, a concept grasped even by very young children when they realize that the $ 25 Grandma gave them to buy clothes means they can spend an equal amount of their allowance on the Power Rangers paraphernalia that Grandma disapproves of. Sensing the danger to liberal groups living off the dole if this idea should take root, Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice (the infamous inventor of "Borking") and her allies on the left fought McIntosh-Istook tooth and nail, repeatedly denying that federal funds were fungible. And they prevailed (thanks mainly to President Clinton's threat to veto any legislation containing such an amendment).
Now that the freshmen are sophomores, a similar idea has been incorporated into the rules, adopted by the GOP majority on Jan. 7, under which the House will operate. Lobbying will not be restricted, but all witnesses who testify before House committees will be required to list the federal grants and contracts they have received during the preceding three years. The rule, dubbed Truth in Testimony, was championed by the Heritage Foundation, which noted that 3,000 or so recipients of federal grants testify before Congress each year and that disclosure would "expose financially self-serving testimony." Nan Aron, et al., are no less unhappy with this. But because Truth in Testimony is a House rule, all they can do is whine. Which they did at some length in a Jan. 16 article in the New York Times -- so much so that Aron unwittingly strayed off the reservation in her comments to reporter Kathryn Seelye, allowing at last that "money theoretically is fungible." The truth, theoretically, will out.