This week lasted a bit longer than most congressional weeks, with both the House and the Senate staying in session late on Friday, April 8. They had to work late to avoid a complete government shutdown of all our departments and agencies due to a lack of funding.
A very similar long work week occurred in December 2010 when Congress passed the same stop-gap appropriations funding bill.
As a matter of fact, this unfinished leftover work product that has caused these late-night, long congressional sessions is the result of work not done by the Pelosi-Reid Congress of last year. Since these two leaders of last year made the calculated decision not to have the 110th Congress consider any of the 11 appropriations bills needed to completely fund our federal government, Congress has had to deal with seven stop-gap appropriations bills in order to create a patchwork of funding for the current fiscal year that our government is operating under.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were successful in drastically altering these last two stop-gap proposals, to the praise of many in the GOP but to the disappointment of many in the tea party movement. What many fail to remember is that in December 2010, when Congress had to pass the third ofthese seven bills, the then yet-to-be-elected Speaker of the House Boehner and the Senate Minority Leader McConnell together were able to introduce into the negotiations one of the cornerstone issues of the GOP at that time, which was the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Without rehashing history, they were able to get them extended using the omnibus appropriations bill left over from the failure of the Pelosi-Reid Congress.
Now fast forward the tape to this past week and Speaker Boehner was able to interject yet another bedrock GOP issue onto the same omnibus appropriations process. Is this the bill that keeps on giving, or what? The spending level available for our government to fund all of the government except our Department of Defense was cut $38.5 billion for the remainder of the six months available in this current fiscal year. Had the omnibus appropriations bill been passed last September with this same rate of spending cuts, the total cut to our federal government spending would have been $77 billion.
In addition, the speaker was able to successfully reinstate a 14-year-old provision that was made null and void after the Pelosi/Reid Congress of 2009 repealed it, which deals with restricting federal abortion funding for the District of Columbia. Finally, the speaker was able to reverse Sen. Harry Reids stand on refusing to allow the Senate to conduct votes on defunding Obamacare and the Planned Parenthood program. These votes will now occur in the Senate under the deal struck late Friday night.
A few more steps have to be taken this week in the House Rules Committee, on the House floor and on the Senate floor for the deal to be set in stone, whereby the president can sign the bill. But from this writers perspective, I would have to say to the House speaker: Job well done!
During the negotiating process that went on last week, the president and the Democrats in Congress were not fruitful in demonizing the add-on or riders being requested by the GOP. They tried desperately to make the Republicans in Congress look like they were overreaching or extreme when asking for these funding changes. I think they failed, in part because the very appropriations process that Nancy Pelosi and Reid canceled last year is the same one where policy and funding changes are supposed to be offered, debated and voted on in normal Congresses.
However, since the Pelosi/Reid Congress of last year had denied this process from all 535 members of Congress on all 11 appropriations bills, asking for a few changes to the hundreds of thousands of programs and projects included in a full funding bill for all of our federal government didnt seem like an overreach.
In addition, since this administration has been spending like it's on crack cocaine, they were not very credible when it came to opposing the spending cuts offered by Speaker Boehner.
Deadlines are a terrific motivator and another doozie is coming up before Congress. The secretary of the treasury wrote a letter to Congress saying the federal governments credit card, known as the debt limit, will bump up against its credit limit and will need to be increased as early as May 16. Hmm, another deadline with huge financial consequences will need to be negotiated between the two houses of Congress and the White House.
Stay tuned to read how Congress puts the finishing touches on the omnibus appropriations bill this week and see how the debt limit debate will take shape in the weeks to come.
Elizabeth B. Letchworth is a retired, elected United States Senate secretary for the majority and minority. Currently she is a senior legislative adviser for Covington & Burling, LLC and is the founder of GradeGov.com.
