It is not expressed in those exact words, of course, Washington being a city of high-sounding euphemisms.

Bartlett told an audience at a meeting near Capitol Hill that "I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t saddle my grandchildren with the kind of debt that we are accumulating.”

The Maryland lawmaker said he intended to write a letter to his constituents saying he could no longer vote for bloated appropriations bills even though that likely means that the potentates who run the appropriations committees and subcommittees in Congress will retaliate by seeing to it that most projects in his district are not funded.

He expressed confidence that the voters in his district - a Republican oasis in a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic - "will understand and support my decision" to no longer submit to the "blackmail" [his term].

Bartlett said he couldn’t sleep one night the previous week because he had voted for an appropriations bill that was stuffed with pork and greatly added to the deficit. He vows there will be no more of that.

"I am 78 years old,” the Marylander said. "There’s nothing I want from anyone. There’s nothing they [the appropriations chairmen] can do to me."

The "you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours" culture on Capitol Hill has been around for decades - at least since the New Deal of the '30s and the Great Society of the '60s opened the floodgates to bloated spending.

After the comment to his audience, Bartlett granted an interview in which he expressed himself in even stronger terms.

"I’m becoming increasingly concerned with our profligate spending and our enormous deficits, and much of our spending is on what I think are unconstitutional issues," the six-term congressman said.

As examples he cited out-of-control spending on health care, philanthropy and education.

"I just made a commitment that I’m no longer going to be swayed by being a team member so that they’ll keep my earmarks in the bills," he declared. "I’m going to vote against appropriations bills that are unconstitutional and are spending too much money.”

Reacting to Bartlett's comments, Free Congress Foundation President Paul Weyrich said he was hopeful that it was the beginning of a trend.

When the appropriators "are no longer able to strong-arm members [of Congress]," said Weyrich, "their power is gone."

He called Bartlett "a very decent and honest man" who "often tells them what they don’t want to hear."

Editor's note: