Congress will spend this final week beforeitbreaks for a week to celebrate our nations birthday spending more money, adding to our exploding debt and hoping to help small businesses expand and be able to borrow money. Well see how well they do when this writer submits the Friday column.
In the meantime, the House will debate and try to pass the financial reform conference report.This is the bill that purports to prevent any future financial disasters from occurring like the one this country experienced in 2008. The bill passed the House of Representatives back in December by a vote of 223-202.
The final stage of the legislation has produced a 2,000-page document and contains almost 400 items where regulators from numerous agencies must fill in the blanks as to the rules and how the law will ultimately be implemented. Some of the big question marks are about the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and how the Securities and Exchange Commission will oversee credit-rating agencies.
Also this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will ask the House to consider the much-needed War Supplemental Appropriations bill. This bill passed the Senate on May 27, 2010 with a price tag of $60 billion. The House wants to up that price tag to $84 billion. By the way, in case you are still counting, all of this is added directly onto our debt because the bill has been designated an emergency and thus doesnt have to be offset or paid for by Congress. This bill has been languishing in the House chamber since the end of May.
The House leadership is considering adding to the bill, language that would deem a budget resolution as passed in Congress. This would serve as an outline or guideline for the spending and funding of the government that Congress must do each year in the form of annual appropriations bills. Since both the House and Senate failed to pass a budget this year, the Congress has been in a bit of flux without its usual budgetary outline to follow.
For a bit of history, let me explain. Congress created the congressional budget process in 1974 whenit passed the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Ever since that 1974 act was made into a public law, at least one House of Congress has always passed an annual budget. That annual budget, passed in at least one House of Congress, would serve as a boundary for Congress when it came to spending. This writer is guessing that lopping an additional $23 billion onto an already porked-upspending bill, then adding to that same bill a deeming mechanism because Congress hasnt had the backbone to pass a budget resolution for the first time in congressional history,might be just a bit too much for some members of Congressto swallow.
Well see if monkeying with the funding for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as replenishing FEMA, is enough emphasis for concerned members of Congress to swallow the add-ons and vote for the bill.
Meanwhile, on the Senate side of the Capitol, they will be considering the small-business lending bill which has a cost of about $30 billion,but is mostly offset by taxes collected. The tax provision requires large corporations to pay their third-quarter taxes from 2015 ... now! Thats right, this gimmick is a real offset in the world of Washington, D.C. smoke and mirrors, but it might be enough for the U.S. Senate to give this bill thumbs up by weeks end.
The Senate also will need to consider the financial reform bill later in the week, assuming the House is successful passing it earlier in their chamber. This might be a lofty task in the Senate. You see, the Senate passed the bill by a 59-39 vote, with two Democratic senators absent.
However, readers need to know that consideration of this measure in the Senate is likely to require 60 affirmative votes to get past a few procedural roadblocks. These roadblocks include waiving the budget because the bill adds to the deficit; waiving the violation of scope issues because the conference added extraneous language, and closing off overall debate. Each one of these could require 60 votes to overcome.
Also, at press time the media were reporting that Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was considering voting against the bill when/if it makes it to the Senate this week. He was one of the 59 votes that supported the bill in May. Lots of heavy lifting will be required of our men and women in Congress this week. Stay tuned to see if Congress has the backbone to carry this load.
Elizabeth B. Letchworth is a retired, four-times-elected United States Senate Secretary for the Majority and Minority. She is the founder of GradeGov.com.
