New rule forces Senators to keep their senses to themselves

While the most important role of the annual budget resolution is to give Congress its appropriations and tax cut targets for the fiscal year, the budget resolution adopted last Thursday for fiscal 2001 also contains a number of important rules and process changes-including a little-noticed provision to limit the number of sense of the Senate amendments offered to the budget resolution.

The provision, championed by Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, R-Okla., a senior member of the Budget Committee, is included in a budget conference report section on "mechanisms for strengthening budgetary integrity," and affects how the Senate parliamentarian interprets whether an amendment to the budget resolution is germane.

The 1974 Congressional Budget Act established a point of order prohibiting non-germane amendments to a budget resolution. The conference report provision accompanying this year's budget resolution states, "For the purposes of interpreting [the Budget Act prohibition on non- germane amendments], an amendment is not germane if it contains predominately precatory language."

Precatory language is language that expresses a recommendation or request-essentially, sense of the Senate language, according to sources with the Senate Budget Committee and Nickles.

It is enforceable by a 60-vote point of order, and unlike other budget enforcement mechanisms created in that section of the conference report, the provision would not expire at the end of fiscal 2001. In 1998 and 1999, Nickles unsuccessfully offered more restrictive language on the Senate floor and in committee, respectively. But this year, Senate Budget Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., included the current provision in his chairman's mark.

Although Nickles and Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, have tried for years to rein in sense of the Senate amendments to the budget resolution, it was Domenici this year who condemned the proliferating practice of offering purely political sense of the Senate amendments during the floor debate on the budget resolution.

Domenici called the practice "preposterous," and declared that senators of both parties "are going so far overboard that we are making this floor much like a circus . . . I don't know what kind of points people are making, but if anybody thinks they are effective just because they win one of these sense of the Senates, let me say, constituents and politicians don't believe they are effective because they do nothing."

Senators who next year want to offer sense of the Senate amendments to the budget resolution will now have to round up support to overcome the 60-vote point of order.

The provision does give senators who want to make a particular point through a sense of the Senate amendment some leeway, because it states that such amendments should be considered non-germane if they contain predominantly precatory language. As a result, it will be up to the Senate parliamentarian to interpret the word predominantly, and determine how much of an amendment's language must be precatory to be considered predominantly precatory, and therefore ruled non-germane.