Republican congressional leaders indicated early Monday morning they hope to complete the remaining fiscal 1998 spending bills Thursday before adjourning for the year.
Progress on the bills was slowed this weekend as key issues became intertwined with the debate over fast track trade negotiating authority - but appropriators said the extra few days should allow them time to wrap up the final controversies.
"With fast track out of the way, I think we can finish this week," said a House Appropriations aide. Before calling it quits early Monday, the House approved another continuing resolution to fund government agencies until midnight Friday. The Senate is expected to take that bill up today, since the current CR expires at midnight.
Despite the guarded optimism of appropriators that the remaining issues can be settled, the Foreign Operations, District of Columbia, and Commerce-Justice-State bills are still mired in controversies over family planning, school vouchers and census sampling, respectively - although a tentative compromise has been reached on the sampling issue.
Of the three, conferees have the most work to do on the Commerce-Justice-State bill. However, a committee aide said the bill should be ready when the House returns Wednesday. House Appropriations ranking member David Obey, D-Wis., said Sunday he was worried Republicans could try to bring up the bill before it had been checked for errors, but waiting until Wednesday may quell those concerns.
On Sunday, the Senate bundled together and passed by voice vote the remaining three bills, along with a separate bill including the school voucher language for D.C. "that the president will veto," Senate Majority Leader Lott conceded. The Senate then went home for the night.
But House appropriators said it did not matter whether the bills are ultimately settled as an omnibus measure or separately because the Commerce-Justice-State bill must be "read out," a process in which staffers search for errors. "There's a fallacy around here that omnibus bills move faster," said a House Appropriations staffer.
The census issue appeared to have been settled late Saturday, with a compromise to drop the ban on the administration's use of "sampling" while expediting a process for bringing the constitutionality issue to the Supreme Court. The language would also create an eight-member "census monitoring board," with four members each appointed by Republicans and Democrats. However, Democratic appropriators late Sunday indicated they were not completely happy with the language.
Meanwhile, the Senate Sunday approved the House bill formally disapproving President Clinton's line item vetoes of 38 projects in the FY98 Military Construction bill. The Clinton administration had conceded it used bad data to strike 18 of the projects. The Senate passed its own version of the bill last week that would have restored 34 projects.
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