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Battle-weary House Dems eye short weeks, easy votes ahead of election
House leaders are preparing a schedule of short weeks and relatively easy votes
over the next seven weeks as they aim for a smooth entry to election season.
If December marked the point at which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
shifted mentally into “campaign mode,” April marks the point at which she and
other House leaders are finally beginning to implement a campaign-first
legislative ground game.
House leaders have scheduled a
number of four-day weeks and relatively easy agenda items in order to give
their members plenty of room to maneuver for their upcoming races.
Their first week back from recess,
the House will consider nearly two-dozen suspension bills, and the only piece
of legislation currently scheduled for debate is a reauthorization of the
National Estuary Program portion of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.
Democrats also will waste no time
pivoting sharply toward jobs legislation, a priority that many Democrats are
eager to shine the spotlight on, especially with unemployment and the economy
remaining top concerns of voters.
In the coming weeks, Democrats will forge ahead with their jobs agenda by introducing a series of bills to further dent the unemployment rate, primarily though a mix of small business tax incentives and loan and access-to-capitol programs.
A number of other job growth
initiatives that Democrats have passed through the House – including a $600
million summer jobs program – are still stuck in the Senate.
Aside from focusing on jobs, top Democratic aides said the next seven weeks of
work will look and feel rather mundane compared to the previous 15 months, in
which House Democrats worked at a unrelenting clip to pass a series of
signature bills that many leaders had been waiting decades for.
There are a few difficult items Pelosi and her caucus can’t avoid.
Democrats are drafting a Fiscal Year 2011 budget, and they are preparing to have to write a supplemental spending bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that will be contentious with the caucus.
Other broad legislative items
appear to be on hold, particularly since their success is dependent on the will
of the Senate.
“If it’s not getting through the Senate, it’s not getting though the House,”
said another top House aide, referring specifically – but not exclusively – to
comprehensive immigration reform, another legislative priority of President
Barack Obama that makes House leaders queasy at its very mention.
The House Democratic Caucus does not have a single strategy on jobs legislation,
which could point to future friction.
Prior to the Easter recess, splits
began to appear both from liberals who wanted to see more direct investments
and spending in infrastructure programs and from conservatives who were wary of
any new deficit spending.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) identified this problem months ago,
telling a group of reporters in January that the primary legislative challenge
Democrats would face in 2010 was balancing the need to spend money to create
jobs and grow the economy against reducing the deficit.
But almost no one expects the task of bridging ideological divides about the
best job-creating formula to be anywhere near as challenging as passing
healthcare legislation.
If Democrats are going to face any significant internal strife in the coming
months it’s likely to be over the budget resolution and an Iraq and Afghanistan
supplemental spending bill.
House leaders are still working behind the scenes with committee chairman and
various groups within the Caucus on the budget, but leadership aides said that
they expect Chairman John Spratt’s (D-S.C.) budget draft to incorporate the
discretionary spending freeze proposed by Obama.
While that freeze will likely upset House liberals, aides said they don’t anticipate
meeting the spending reductions called for by conservative Blue Dog Democrats,
either.
The budget that leaders hope to
produce is one that nobody particularly loves, but that too many people don’t
hate.
The shape of that budget document – as well as the degree to which leaders have
to fight to win votes – may be the first measurement of how much damage the
healthcare bill did at either end of the caucus.
At the liberal end of the spectrum, it could forecast the severity of the fight leaders will have on their hands when the time comes to pass a supplemental spending bill for the Afghanistan War, which is rapidly becoming more and more unpopular throughout Democratic ranks.
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