Congress should leave the Easter egg hunt to the children.

For too long, House and Senate members have turned critical spending bills into Easter baskets overflowing with goodies. They have perfected hiding pet projects hundreds of pages into those bills, where only a handful of eagle-eyed observers can hunt them down.

Taken individually, they might not matter, but Congress buys these eggs by the crate. In the most recent spending bill signed by President Barack Obama, the so-called "earmarks" totaled nearly $8 billion.

Two Wisconsin legislators, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, have joined Republican Sen. John McCain in an attempt to rein in that extraneous spending. They have revived a proposal for a legislative line-item veto.

The all-or-nothing culture is what makes this practice dangerous. Presidents' choices are to sign an entire bill, warts and all, or reject the whole thing and tell Congress to start over.

Considering the speed at which Washington moves and the force it takes to get anything done there, they rarely choose the latter. That's how street-wise members of Congress can essentially hold a bill for ransom, refusing to vote for it until they get money for their own projects.

The line-item veto would give the president a third option to make those backroom negotiations less damaging. Knowing any individual project could be singled out publicly, lawmakers might think twice about adding to the pile. Taxpayers shouldn't be ambushed by news that they owe $819,000 for catfish genetics research and $951,000 for a solar highway in Oregon - two of the earmarks from the latest series of congressional bills that drew McCain's scorn.

For those afraid of investing too much power in the White House, this isn't a veto in the usual sense. It would give the president limited power to individually strip wasteful projects out of spending bills and ship them back to Congress for a second look. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1990s that a line-item veto like most governors enjoy wouldn't fly.

Some of those earmarks could very well go to good use. The recipients of more than $33 million that Democratic Rep. David Obey single-handedly brought home to Wisconsin certainly won't complain. But those eggs should be hidden in plain view so everyone can judge them on their merits, something Ryan and Feingold's bill will encourage.

Unless the eggs hidden at the bottom of these baskets are cracked open, the public will remain the ones with yolk on their faces.