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Sen. Durbin says omnibus is on the way |
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By Manu Raju
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Posted: 11/09/07 08:50 PM [ET] |
Democrats will attempt to piece together most of the remaining annual appropriations bills into one “omnibus” package despite the procedural hurdles, a senior Senate Democrat said Thursday.
With legislative days dwindling before Congress leaves for the holidays and none of the 12 funding bills signed into law, Democrats are trying to avoid punting the funding measures until next year. That scenario would open them up to increased attacks by Republicans and the White House for bungling the appropriations process just as election season gets into full swing.
“I don’t think it is physically possible for us to do the [appropriations] bills individually,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who also sits on the Appropriations Committee. “There will be some — defense appropriations is one of them — that may come out [individually].”
Durbin added: “By and large, we’re going to face the need for an omnibus at some point.”
Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), declined to comment on the possibility of an omnibus bill.
Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif.), criticized Republicans’ fiscal track record, but declined to comment on the prospects of an omnibus. A House leadership aide said a decision on putting together an omnibus bill is still in the making.
Complicating matters for an omnibus package is the new ethics law that allows the Senate to strike extraneous provisions added during conference committees. In the first test of that rule, the Senate GOP on Wednesday successfully removed $65 billion in discretionary funding for veterans’ issues and military construction from another spending bill — the $151 billion package for the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education departments.
If more bills are pieced together during conference negotiations, Republicans will almost certainly raise a point of order and attempt to strike new language on the Senate floor and force the bills to move separately, GOP aides said Thursday.
But those threats do not appear to faze Democrats, who are hoping that voters will blame Republicans and an unpopular President Bush for going to lengths in blocking their agenda.
Democrats say that Bush is showing no desire to compromise on an overall figure for domestic discretionary spending. On that front, Congress is proposing to spend about $22 billion more than Bush, who has threatened to veto bills that exceed his request. The White House calls the additional spending excessive and reckless.
“We’re going to need some understanding where this White House is going to end up when this is all over — whether they’re prepared to sit down and cooperate and try to reach some compromise,” Durbin said.
When asked how Democrats will get around Republican efforts to split an omnibus on the floor, Durbin said, “We’ll continue to learn that unless we have bipartisan cooperation, the president won’t get his spending bill.”
The spending battle plays into the campaign themes for both parties. Republicans are increasingly trying to make the argument that Democrats have mismanaged their chance to run Capitol Hill, while Democrats say that by electing more of their candidates to Congress, they can overcome Republican roadblocks and enact an agenda popular with most Americans.
Even though the GOP often employed omnibus spending bills when it controlled Capitol Hill, House and Senate Republicans have been eager to attack a massive Democratic spending package to argue that the new majority is failing to live up to its 2006 campaign promise of changing how Washington works.
“They promised to do it better and to do it differently, and they’ve done it worse. That’s the main point,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters recently. “One of the principal promises the new Democratic majority made was they were going to do it differently, they were going to get the job done on time. That didn’t happen. They were going to send individual appropriation bills. That didn’t happen.”
Senate Democrats are ratcheting up their rhetoric, too, eager to call the Senate GOP hypocritical for largely supporting the spending bills on the floor but changing their position to back Bush at the end of the legislative process. The Democrats also point out that they were forced to pass a slew of fiscal 2007 appropriations bills left behind by the 109th Congress, which was controlled by Republicans.
The question ultimately remains whether either side will let the fight lead to a shutdown of the government, like the infamous standoff between the Clinton White House and the Republican-led Congress in 1995. Neither side seems to have much appetite for that scenario to repeat itself, but neither side is backing down.
“Given his fiscal record, everyone should understand the president’s latest stand is driven by partisan politics rather than a desire to pursue proper fiscal policy,” Reid said recently. “But it is irresponsible. His failed presidency has left him with little else to become relevant.” |
