Senate returns to budget tangle

Once again the Senate finds itself returning from its August recess to a mountain of unfinished business. Plagued by competing demands for floor time on controversial issues and a major confrontation over spending with President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has moved only one of 12 appropriations measures thus far.

That pace matches last year's, when only two appropriations bills were signed into law and Congress punted the rest into this year. At the time, Democrats lambasted the Republican "Do-Nothing" Congress en route to taking control of Capitol Hill.

Reid appears poised to make a push on individual spending bills in the fall, although it remains to be seen how successful he will be. The mid-September progress report on the Iraq war and a possible fight over the attorney general nominee threaten to push domestic spending off the agenda until the time when lawmakers get eager to adjourn for the holidays. Further complicating matters, Reid's slim 51-49 majority could be even leaner on any given day, as Democratic senators running for the White House miss key votes.

"Putting aside for a moment the partisan overlay and the philosophical differences, the structural problems start with time: There isn't much of it," said Eric Ueland, who was chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Prospects are growing that leaders will have to bundle the remaining bills into one or more "omnibus" spending packages, which combine money for many government departments. Critics say that process bars all but a handful of key negotiators from influencing the outcome and enhances White House leverage over the budget process.

When one chamber or the other (more often the Senate) fails to act on spending bills to fund the individual government departments, Congress resorts to omnibus legislation. Most often, this happens when the House, Senate, and White House cannot agree upfront on an overall spending blueprint.

President Reagan spent his first seven years battling Democrats over spending, resulting in annual omnibus bills. When President Clinton was at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and refused to pare down spending, the GOP Congress forced a government shutdown.

In the past several years when the GOP controlled Congress, Bush regularly battled his own party members over spending priorities even within an agreed-upon budget. This year, Democrats are proposing to spend $23 billion more than Bush wants, leading to veto threats on most of the fiscal 2008 spending bills.

In some years -- notably, when Congress and the White House reached major bipartisan budget deals in 1987, 1990, and 1997 -- the appropriations process ran smoothly. During one unprecedented stretch, from the last year of the Reagan presidency in 1988 through the first President Bush's four-year tenure and the first two years of the Clinton administration, Congress enacted all of the spending bills individually. "The reason we were successful in those years was, we had sat down and done the hard work at the beginning," said Bill Hoagland, a 25-year Senate budget aide who most recently worked for Frist. "Maybe it has become more partisan."

Internal Senate factors also come into play. The chamber has looser rules and guarantees the minority party more rights, unlike the tightly controlled House where leaders can fairly easily impose rules to shut down debate. Thomas Mann, a congressional expert at the Brookings Institution, said that the minority in the Senate has increasingly used dilatory tactics to drag out debate. "It's a question of priorities, limited floor time, the now-routinization of the filibuster, and refusal to give unanimous consent agreements by the minority party on almost anything as a way of defeating majority party priorities," Mann said.

Congressional veterans say that the proliferation of unrelated riders that lawmakers have sought to attach to appropriations over the past decade or so has contributed to the slowdown. "We had layers of things coming in that had nothing to do with appropriations at all; huge amounts of legislative, even tax bills, for the first time got plopped into an appropriations conference report," said James English, who was the Senate Appropriations Committee's Democratic staff director from 1989 to 2001.

Frist was able to pass all but one spending bill on the Senate floor in 2003 and all of them in 2005. But he bore the blame for recent Senate failures to move appropriations, most notably last year when the chamber failed to pass nine of the 12 spending bills.

Aides who have served in the Senate leadership said the reality was more complicated. During 2004 and 2006, the past two election years, Frist embarked on a deliberate strategy of keeping individual appropriations bills off the floor, fearing a blizzard of politically motivated Democratic amendments that would force Republicans to cast embarrassing votes. Better to focus on "red-meat" issues important to the party's conservative base, Frist thought, rather than take up time with drawn-out spending debates that would keep senators off the campaign trail. GOP senators in tight election races also pressed Frist for the reprieve, even as they trumpeted the home-state projects they inserted in the committee-reported versions of spending bills.

"There was a political judgment made ... that there's no reason to give the Democrats, who don't care about getting appropriations bills done, a chance to use them for political purposes when everybody figured they were going to be done after the election anyway," said a former GOP leadership aide.

Frist's own party turned on him when the strategy that worked in 2004 backfired in 2006. "We didn't take the votes, did we? And look at the results in November. If it was our Republican approach to save ourselves, we lost ourselves," Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said on the floor in December.

English said that previous leaders were more committed to moving bills one by one through the Senate even during tough political climates. He singled out former Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., for praise. "They understood the fact that the constitutional responsibility of the Congress, if they don't do anything else, is to enact appropriations," he said.

Even when conservatives first took over Congress, they had a sense that lawmakers should abide by their institutional responsibilities to pass appropriations bills, another veteran Senate aide said. "In 1995, it still was believed that you've got to do appropriations. Nobody said, 'Why don't we just filibuster the bill?' That didn't occur to anybody," the aide said. "So I guess things have changed in the last 12 years or so."

In large part the recent acrimony has been driven by controversy surrounding earmarks, or funds set aside for specific parochial projects. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., was an architect of the final breakdown last year when he refused to allow the Senate to pass individual spending bills.

He and other Senate conservatives were content to let the government run on a continuing resolution, which cedes more spending authority to the White House, rather than allow Congress to approve any more "pork" projects. "There's a reason it's called the executive branch," DeMint said. "Congress was never intended to start designating money to their favorite charities all over the country." The South Carolinian said he would seek to debate earmarks again when Democrats decide to bring fiscal 2008 appropriations bills to the floor. "They're afraid for these things to see the light of day. They're afraid of the amendment process," he said.

English contends that dilatory tactics would prove that Republicans are more interested in politics than in trying to accomplish substantive changes. "It seems to me, ironically, that the people who want to fight pork barrel would understand that if you don't allow individual appropriations bills to come up and take your shots ... you'll only end up with an omnibus conference report on which you can raise hell, but you don't get anything knocked out, because it's an up-or-down vote," he said.

The earmark issue has already taken up a good chunk of floor time this year, as part of the ethics and lobbying bill. But observers say that Reid, a former appropriator who is close to Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., is more cognizant than his predecessor was of the constitutional importance of appropriations.

Just before he adjourned the Senate for the August recess, Reid reeled off a list of priorities for Senate floor debate between Labor Day and Columbus Day. At the top of the list were appropriations bills. "We have 11 appropriations bills to negotiate and pass, each of which reflects an important need our country faces," he said. Reid has scheduled time for the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs funding bills as among the first orders of business. The Defense appropriations bill, the State and Foreign Operations bill, and the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development measure are also likely to come up, the latter especially in light of the Minnesota bridge collapse. But Reid has made no commitments beyond that, other than a continuing resolution to fund government operations beyond September.