The Hill reports that Members of Congress who failed to disclose their earmark requests as required by new rules in the House will still get their goodies.

Members who failed to disclose their earmarks as required by the April 4 deadline should have them rejected out of hand. But Congress makes the rules, and Congress can break the rules.

Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com compiled a state-by-state list of links to earmark requests recently. Because Members of Congress published their requests in different formats, information about all the earmarks that have been requested is still rather obscure.

A new poll released today reveals that 43 percent of African Americans in South Carolina support private school choice while only 40 percent oppose it. What’s even more interesting, however, is that 53 percent said that “giving parents a tax credit or scholarship to choose the best school for their children — public or private — would improve the state’s dismal high school graduation rate.”

So an additional 10 percent of respondents think the program will work but don’t currently support it. Why? Perhaps because many black religious and political leaders in South Carolina have criticized the concept for years.

Take, for instance, the Rev. Joe Darby, a Charleston Minister I had the pleasure of communicating with a few years ago. Very pleasant guy. Absolutely opposes the education tax credit bill currently before the state legislature, and the whole idea of all parents getting to easily choose between public and private schools.

Why? Well, let’s ask him. I’ve just invited Joe to have a conversation about it on this website. I hope he will agree, because SC is racking up dropouts faster than almost any other state in the nation, and these kids need access to schools that can help them stick it through to graduation and better prepare them for life and work.

What do you say, Joe?

Tremendous column today by George Will giving President Obama and his education secretary exactly what they deserve for their DC choice skulduggery. This story is not going away!

Catch all of our coverage of the devious goings-on, by the way, right here.

• David Rittgers speaks out on the O’Reilly Factor about the government’s policy on torture.

• At National Review online, Patrick Michaels weighs in on Earth Day.

• Will Wilkinson warns of problems with Obama’s budget on Marketplace.

• Richard Rahn explains why the current tax system needs to be overhauled and replaced in The Washington Times.

• In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Swaminathan Aiyar discusses the future of the dollar.

Though I’m not a Virginia resident or voter, nor a donor to politicians, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell (whose party affiliation I’m not aware of) has added me to his email list. His name is similar to a past roommate, and that affinity has caused me to open more of his emails than I ordinarily would.

Today’s is worth writing about: It’s a political candidate transparently trying to scare voters and use their fear for fundraising.

Dear Jim,

Terror suspects could be headed to Virginia…

With the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay the federal government must find new locations in which to house and try the roughly 240 terrorist suspects currently held 90 miles from our shores. Recent news reports indicate that the Department of Justice is considering transferring a number of the detainees to the Commonwealth of Virginia. One specific location: Alexandria. And other Virginia locations could be possibilities as well.

There are security details to be worked out when prisoners are transferred out of Guantanamo Bay, but the prisoners themselves are not dangerous as such. They’re prisoners, and they will always be under heavy guard. Terrorists are not radioactive, and they do not have lasers built into their eyes.

The problems with housing prisoners in the past have been over-the-top security precautions that make a great show but don’t necessarily meet actual security problems associated with housing terror suspects.

Bills have been introduced to bar detainees from being transferred to various states.

A precious few Americans have exhibited cool in this fear-of-detainees brouhaha. Alexandria Sheriff Dana A. Lawhorne is quoted in this Washington Post article, at least saying “he would do what he can: ‘You can’t run the other way when your country calls.’ ”

But McDonnell, the politician seeking a prominent leadership position in the state, would “lead” by pretending that captured terrorists are too big a security risk for Virginia. It’s shameful fear-mongering meant to capitalize on the ignorance and weakness of Virginians who don’t understand terrorism. The only links in the text of the email are to the fundraising page on McDonnell’s Web site.

McDonnell exhibits leadership malpractice with this kind of campaigning.

Government-backed equity was offered to adequately capitalized banks in order to remove the “stigma” from banks receiving TARP funds, and the management of these institutions took the bait and accepted the money.

Surprise, surprise: now they discover that the money came with strings.

Some banks want to pay back the TARP money to extricate themselves from government restrictions on compensation and pressure to make loans the banks view as unprofitable. Treasury Secretary Geithner has made it clear that the decision to pay back the funds early won’t be left to the banks, but to the Treasury: “My basic obligation is to make sure the system as a whole … has the ability to provide the credit that recovery requires.”

The banking system has thus become a tool for the government to further its policies. And the bankers themselves put their institutions in that position. While taxpayers may understandably feel the bankers got their comeuppance, there are at least two major problems with the Bush/​Obama policy.

First, Mr. Geithner has misdiagnosed the problem.

We are in recovery from the effects of the bursting of a massive housing and finance bubble funded by debt. That boom in turn financed a consumption binge of monumental proportions.

The only resolution of a spending binge is restraint in the form of saving. Recovery requires not more credit and another boom, but a dose of economic sobriety.

Individuals and firms know that and are de-leveraging – unwinding what they now realize is excessive debt. That will take the rest of this year and the better part of 2010. Overall, credit is down because demand is down.

Second, and even more disturbing: it appears that the Obama Administration wants to control the financial sector in order to gain control over what Lenin called the “Commanding Heights” of the U.S. economy: the major industries and sources of employment. The auto industry is a prime example, and one in which the administration has involved itself directly. It is also pressuring major recipients of TARP funds to ease the terms of the loans they have made to firms such as Chrysler. Treasury is attempting to use the banks to conduct fiscal policy through credit allocation.

The bankers taking TARP funds got their firms into a mess and deserve no sympathy. Anyone believing in free markets, however, must oppose this power grab by the Obama Administration.

Let the banks pay the funds back and let it be a lesson for CEOs and their stockholders: If you take government funds, you have taken on an unreliable business partner.

Today the Supreme Court heard argument in Ricci v. DeStefano, the “reverse discrimination” case in which the city of New Haven refused to certify the results of a race-neutral promotion exam whose objective results would have required, under civil service rules, the promotion of only white and Hispanic (but no black) firefighters.

The firefighters who were thus denied promotions sued the city, claiming racial discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Remarkably, a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals—including oft-mentioned Supreme Court contender Sonia Sotomayor—summarily affirmed the district court’s ruling against the firefighters, though Judge José Cabranes (a Clinton appointee) later excoriated the panel for not grappling with the serious constitutional issues raised by the case.

The Cato Institute filed a brief, joined by the Reason Foundation and the Individual Rights Foundation, pointing out the absurd incentives at play: if the lower court’s ruling stands, employers will throw out the results of exams (or other criteria) that produce racial disparity, even if those exams are race-neutral, entirely valid, and extremely important to the employer and (as in this case) the public.

Today the Court seemed starkly divided. The “liberal” justices hinted that an employer should be allowed to be “race conscious” to avoid Title VII lawsuits alleging “disparate impact” against minorities in hiring and promotions. The “conservatives” were disturbed that the only reason the firefighters weren’t promoted was their race. Nobody seemed persuaded by the government’s request—really an attempt to avoid taking a firm stand on a controversial issue—that the judgment be vacated and the case remanded for further factual development and legal rulings by the lower courts. Justice Kennedy will likely be the swing vote, and I predict that he will side with the conservatives, albeit narrowly in a separate concurrence as he did in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1, the race-based school assignment case from 2007.

It was in Parents Involved that Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Quite so. The Supreme Court should thus reverse the Second Circuit, establishing that an employer can only discount test results when there is a “strong basis in evidence” that the test is somehow biased against a particular racial group.