In many cases, Democrats weren't real specific about what kind of "change" they were promising when they asked voters to restore them to congressional leadership last fall.

There was at least one specific, though. The then-minority party promised to end the corrupt and wasteful institution of porkfat "earmarks," in which legislators slip special-interest allocations into bills at the last minute, avoiding even the remote possibility that a contrarian colleague might hold up a given contributor payoff for public debate and ridicule.

Democrats have made minor progress on that one. But they had a chance to do better. This week, they could have embraced a mechanism that surely would have helped -- the line-item veto. But weirdly enough -- unless, of course, some cynic wants to suggest they were never serious in the first place -- they killed it.

The proposal was for a scaled-back version of the presidential line-item veto, passed under a Republican congressional majority in 1996 with the support of Democratic President Bill Clinton, but tossed out by the Supreme Court two years later on grounds that it allowed the president to single-handedly change laws passed by Congress.

(President Clinton had used the line-item veto to strike $2 billion from various larded-up spending bills. But big-government types hated the veto and sued to contest its constitutionality.)

President Bush came back last year to propose a weaker, modified version. Instead of being empowered to unilaterally strike items from bills, he would have been authorized to send one or more line items back to Congress for up-or-down votes. A simple majority vote would then have been sufficient to retain the spending, as opposed to the two-thirds supermajority required under the earlier plan.

But, ah, the members would be on the record, you see. Constituents could then ask the senator from Delaware why the heck he was spending their hard-earned tax money studying how to use the byproducts of a Washington state salmon cannery, or on some Alaskan "bridge to nowhere."

Congress would have had "10 days to comply, and would not be allowed to amend it or delay a vote by filibuster," The Washington Post reported. "If Congress did not support the president's request, the targeted spending would have to proceed."

"This is unquestionably constitutional," opined Walt Dellinger, who served as acting solicitor general for Bill Clinton when the line-item veto issue was previously before the high court. "It is possible to construct a constitutionally defensible provision under which Congress would be required to cast a recorded vote on particular items."

Needless to say, champion pork wrangler Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia led the Democratic assault on this new line-item veto plan -- joined by Nevada's own Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Interestingly enough, back in 1996, Sen. Byrd actually supported something close to the current proposal, as a preferable alternative to the "strong" line-item veto then steaming through Congress like an express train.

But that, of course, was back when the fresh-faced Republicans had the fearsome appearance of real reformers.

Nowadays the old guard is back in charge, and "change" is what you get when you pay for your coffee with a five dollar bill.