This afternoon, the House passed its $463.5 billion "CRomnibus" spending resolution for FY2007 by a 286-140 vote. Approval by the Senate and the President are required to keep the government operating after Feb. 15.

Several senior Republican House members decried the legislative process and elements of the resolution, most pointedly the $2.5 billion for base closures, about $3 billion below the President's original $5.6 billion request for FY2007. But House Democrats say that additional needs for BRAC and military housing will be addressed in the supplemental that the Administration will send to Congress next week.

Curiously, in its Statement of Administration Position, the White House takes the resolution to task for underfunding BRAC and military housing, suggesting that the President perhaps had not intended to include funds for these in his long-anticipated war financing emergency supplemental.

2 Democrats voted against the measure, Dennis Kucinich (OH) and Paul Kanjorski (PA); 57 Republicans voted in favor of it.

House Appropriations chair Rep. David Obey (D-WI)'s fiscal 2007 budget bill, H. J. Res. 20, filed late Monday, provides for $463.5 billion in spending. It complies with the statutory ceiling on spending; it also declares that earmarks it may contain "shall have no legal effect," though "ongoing" earmarks contained in bills prior to FY06 can continue. The bill is expected to reach the House floor for a vote on Wednesday (tomorrow).

Though some have complained about the amount of time available to review the 137 page bill before tomorrow's vote, very few have said they will oppose it on substantive grounds.

For more information, see:

• Text of H. J. Res. 20
• Summary of H. J. Res. 20

Constitutional scholars agree: Congress has the power to shape war policy. Army Times has more.

A panel of constitutional scholars said Tuesday that Congress clearly has the power, if it chooses to use it, to stop the war in Iraq.

The difficulty in exercising the power is political, not constitutional, in getting a veto-proof majority in the House and Senate to agree on binding legislation to either cut off funding for combat operations or repeal the previously passed authorization to use force, the legal experts said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

See this article for more on the technical details of how Congress could use the appropriations process to influence war policy.

Tom Paine has an interesting article on an overlooked government handout to the oil and gas industry.

When the U.S. House of Representatives voted to eliminate $14 billion in tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry on January 18, it left at least one item off its target list: a billion-dollar handout to a research consortium that includes publicly traded companies that reaped $100 billion in profits in 2005.

Without congressional action, the money will soon begin flowing to the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, a 501(c)(3) formed in 2002 by the Gas Technology Institute, a natural gas research organization that was facing the loss of a federally-mandated source of income that once topped $200 million annually.

Championed by disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, the oil and gas subsidy was slipped late one night into the massive Energy Policy Act of 2005 after a House-Senate conference committee had completed its deliberations on the bill. The conferees thus had no chance to consider the provision before it reached the House and Senate floor. Though this is not the first time we have seen a corporate giveaway stealthily inserted into a bill in the early hours of the morning, it is a striking example of how taxpayers get bilked by corporations and Congress.

A new edition of the old GOP chestnut, the line-item veto, is getting substantial Senate floor time during consideration of S. 2, the Fair Minimum Wage Act. Senate Budget Committee ranking member Judd Gregg (R-NH) has offered an amendment to the minimum wage bill to grant the president line-item "enhanced rescission" authority to strike earmarks from tax and spending bills.

Gregg's amendment, called the Second Look at Wasteful Spending Act of 2007, would allow the president four rescission packages per year and require Congress to vote on a proposed rescission within 10 days. Currently, the president can withhold funding for up to 45 days for a program it asks Congress to rescind.

The Senate is currently considering the amendment. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has filed for cloture, a vote on which tomorrow is expected to fail, given vociferous opposition from Appropriations Committee chair Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Touted as a tool to help presidents pick pork out of legislation and thus eliminate wasteful items and reduce the deficit, the Gregg amendment actually proposes an unorthodox, quite possibly unconstitutional incursion on Congress's legislative authority. The Supreme Court declared similar line-item legislation unconstitutional in 1998, but Sen. Gregg points out that under his version, Congress would have to approve any proposed recission, unlike the original law. It is not clear that this difference would correct the constitutional defect. Critics also say the Constitution already provides the president with ample opportunity to stop wasteful or excessive spending via the veto, something the current president has not used once in six years of signing spending bills. Nor has he ever used his existing recission authority.

Furthermore, opponents say, it could make legislators vulnerable to hardball pressure from presidents who seek to horse-trade votes by threatening to veto a given lawmaker's favored provision. Similarly, it could make it that much harder to strike deals on politically risky legislative packages such as entitlement reform by allowing the president to cherry-pick items out of the bargain after the fact.p>

The arguments are reprised in a floor statement by Senator Conrad yesterday.

An interesting discussion on PayGo has popped up on TPM Cafe. Amitai Etzioni wrote we shouldn't go by PayGo because it'll only lead to surpluses that Republicans will squander on their well-heeled constituents. Point well taken. Paul Krugman recently made a similar point, though less in terms of PayGo and more in terms of the deficit.

But that's not the end of the story. Greg Anrig at TPM Cafe has an interesting response to Etzioni's post. He thinks PayGo is a good way to define Democrats as responsible and competent and Republicans as crazy.

I'd go farther and say PayGo is plain old good policy. And it doesn't, as Etzioni seems to claim, necessarily lead to deficit-reduction. All it does is help keep Congress from making the deficit worse. If Democrats want to invest more in social priorities, they can certainly do so as long as they pay for it.

Perhaps Etzioni is worried that tax receipts will go way up on their own this session, and PayGo will keep the Dems from spending these new revenues. In that unlikely event, which I haven't heard anyone say they expect, maybe Dems should go ahead and spend some of it. But let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

Plus, PayGo doesn't have anything to do with discretionary spending; Dems could spend as much as they want through the appropriations process. Discretionary programs, after all, could use more funding. Why not concentrate on that?

But the bottom line is that PayGo mostly puts up a (surmountable) obstacle for massive legislated increases in entitlement spending or decreases in revenues. If any party wants to do either of those things, they should abide by PayGo and budget for it. Otherwise, it's too easy for present Congresses to reduce future revenues, which makes it harder for future Congresses to pass important policy. Isn't having Congress in such a weakened position all too familiar by now?

More news that this year's budget underfunds important programs. This time, it's the Millenium Challenge program, which provides funding to foster the development of poor countries.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's signature foreign-assistance program is likely to run out of money this year, leaving in the lurch several poor countries that have labored to meet its strict eligibility standards, according to aid officials.

Mr. Bush introduced the Millennium Challenge program in 2002 as a new approach to fix the perceived failures of overseas-development assistance.

The grants would be large enough to transform the recipient nations' economic fortunes, he said then, and the money would go only to countries that met quantitative standards for honest government, free-market policies and generous social spending.

Now the program's budget is expected to fall short of its projected needs by $400 million to $1 billion, depending on the outcome of congressional negotiations over the coming weeks. The crunch comes at a time when Morocco, Tanzania, Mozambique and several other developing nations are nearing agreements on huge aid packages.

The newly-empowered Democrats are now reaping a grim reward for winning the November election. They have to clean up the Republican's appropriations mess, and reports show that so far, they're having a rough time doing it.

Regular readers might recall that the Republican Congress did not pass nine of the eleven required appropriations bills that provide funding for discretionary programs. Instead, the last Congress passed a draconian "continuing resolution" (CR) that the Democrats have little choice but to extend for the entire year. Congress Daily ($) reports on the Democrats' plans for the extension:

Drafting a bill to cover nine unfinished spending bills for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 is proving no easy task, as demands for additional spending pile up while Democrats try to live within the tight budget constraints still in place on the new Congress. "There is absolutely no way to meet all the needs of the country. But we're going to do our absolute best to meet the priority needs," said a spokesman for Senate Appropriations Chairman Byrd.

Making matters more urgent, funding shortfalls in the CR are cutting operations at some agencies. For instance, the Small Business Administration's disaster relief program, which assists Katrina victims, is about to run out of money. And the CR is underfunding the Justice Department, forcing the FBI, DEA, and ATF to furlough staffing and cut back on recruitment efforts.

These agencies could just be the tip of the iceberg. The CR covers nearly half of all discretionary programs. It should provide roughly $500 billion in funding- about a fifth of the entire federal budget. More news about underfunded agencies is pretty likely.

The upshot is that this bare-bones budget does not meet public needs. The new Congress has a chance to define itself by crafting a FY '08 budget that properly invests in our priorities. And to avoid an embarrassing mess like this, they need to put in enough work to pass it on time.

On January 4th, the Senate introduced S. 10, the Restoring Fiscal Discipline Act of 2007. The act lets any Senator raise a point of order in the Senate that, much like the new House rule, bars consideration of deficit-increasing tax and mandatory spending legislation. The point of order could be overruled by a 3/5th majority, or 60 votes.

S. 10 would also lets Senators raise a point or order that would bar consideration of reconciliation directives and bills that increase the deficit. The reconciliation process, which protects bills concerning mandatory spending and taxes from a Senate filibuster, has been used to pass regressive tax cuts that account for about half of the debt added by new policies under the Bush administration. The point of order could also be overturned by a 3/5ths majority.

Though the bill has not been debated or amended yet, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called it one of his top 10 legislative priorities. Both points of order in S. 10 would expire in 2012.

Oddly, the bill takes a different form than the House rule. S. 10 is a statute requiring the approval of the House, the Senate and the President. Yet it would only affect legislation in the Senate, and it seems like it could have been introduced as a Senate resolution, which only requires Senate approval. Why it was not introduced as such is a mystery.

By a 280-152 vote earlier this afternoon, the House adopted the civility and fiscal responsibility titles of Speaker Pelosi's internal rules package. Lobby and ethics reform titles were adopted yesterday.

• Conference Committee and Voting Time Rules: require that 48 hours notice of meetings be provided to ensure member attendance, making sure information is available to all conferees, and barring conference report text changes after members have signed the report.
• PAYGO Budget Enforcement Rule: requires spending cut or tax increase offsets be included in any measure providing new entitlement spending or tax cuts. But because it is a House rule and not law, it can be waived with a supermajority vote and survive a point of order against a measure that violates the rule.
• Earmark Disclosure Rule: requires that sponsors of individual projects be identified in all spending, authorizing and tax legislation. Members will have to provide a justification for each earmark and certify that neither they nor their spouses will benefit from it.

Democrats won over 48 Republicans, mostly on the strength of the earmarks provision: "I appreciate and I want to compliment the Democrats for doing stronger earmark reform than we did," said renown porkhunter Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ).

The PAYGO piece severely restricts Democrats' room for maneuver on promised initiatives ranging from AMT reform, to cutting student loan interest rates, to fixing the Medicare prescription drug "doughnut hole." But, as we have noticed, talk is already afoot about how to tiptoe around PAYGO.

Posted by Dana Chasin, 04:59:24 PM

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Wednesday, January 03, 2007