Mike Huckabee at CNN/YouTube Debate, originally uploaded by Rob Bluey.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee held a conference call for bloggers at 3 p.m. today. As far as I could tell, I was the only blogger on the call who wasn’t an avowed Huckabee supporter. I’m surprised I was invited, but I’m grateful because these calls provide a great opportunity to ask tough policy questions of the candidates.

Today I took up a cause advocated by Citizens Against Government Waste to get the presidential candidates to say if they would issue an executive order instructing federal agencies to ignore earmarks. Fiscal conservatives are pressuring President Bush to do just that and are hoping to draw the presidential contenders into the debate as well. Here is Huckabee’s answer:

I think some of them ought to be vetoed. If they can’t be vetoed, then ignore them. But I’ll tell you another thing we need to do: push for total transparency of the expenditures of Congress, something we don’t have.

Every time the federal government writes a check, we ought to be able to access the information of that check on the Internet. We ought to know how much it costs to mow the lawn of the federal courthouse in Des Moines, Iowa, so if somebody looks at that, they could say, ‘Are you kidding me? I could do that for a third.’ A lot of things would change if we knew exactly how the money was spent and it was spelled out in plain, clear English and not in a bunch of governmentese.

So part of it is transparency. Some of it is challenging it, exposing it and making people outraged. And if we had a transparent expenditure system, add to that a transparent tax system, which the FairTax is, you change the texture of this country in about 100 days. Because once people knew how their government was spending their money, and once they knew how much money the government was getting from them, you wouldn’t have to wait a long time before there were some cataclysmic changes in the way that Washington operated.

His answer wasn’t exactly as strong as it could have been. As one congressional aide reminded me, presidential candidates need to be reminded that they don’t need a line-item veto to block earmarks since more than 90% of them aren’t even law. Of course, I’ll take anything I can get from a candidate who named earmark-loving Rep. Don Young the congressional chairman of his exploratory committee.

UPDATE — 5:06 p.m.: Josh Trevino, a Huckabee supporter on the call, filed this report about the conservation.