Moving with surprising speed, the House gave final approval Friday to a more than $1 trillion budget bill that fills in the blank spaces of the August debt accords and sets a new template for government spending through the 2012 elections.
The strong 296-121 bipartisan vote removes any remaining threat of a shutdown this weekend and Senate passage is now expected Saturday afternoon. As added insurance ?and to allow time for the Capitol?s enrollment clerks to complete the processing of the bill? a stopgap resolution to keep agencies funded through Dec. 23 was also approved and sent onto the Senate.
Continue ReadingFilling over 1,200 pages, the appropriations giant is remarkable for its reach, covering the heart of President Barack Obama?s domestic priorities, the Pentagon, and foreign aid plus tens of billions more related to the war in Afghanistan.
The final details were not released until early Thursday morning and even after that, changes were still being made for the White House less than 24 hours before the Friday?s House vote. But Republicans?who had long complained of Democrats doing the same thing?shrugged off any inconsistency, and the floor debate was remarkably compressed and the outcome never in serious doubt.
?There ought to be a portion of humility for all of us to understand that the legislative process is difficult,? said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), gently reminding the GOP of its past rage at him when Democrats were in power. ?I rise in strong support of this bill, and I urge my colleagues to support this piece of legislation. None of them have read it. Not one of us has read every page of this bill.?
But for history, reading may be required. Indeed, after the burst of stimulus spending at the beginning of Obama?s first year, Washington is now very much a government retrenching after a year of real cuts that have rolled back domestic appropriations to Bush-era levels when adjusted for inflation.
That translates into a roughly 10 percent cut from spending levels last January when Republicans took over the House, and under the August debt agreement, this will become a new plateau stretching into the future with annual growth pegged below the rate of inflation.
Conservatives remain unhappy that the change has not been greater, and the new $1.043 trillion cap for 2012 is truly a retreat from the much deeper cuts proposed by the House Republicans? budge resolution last April. Then again, just a year ago Democrats were proposing their own omnibus bill, complete with parochial earmarks and spending $73 billion higher for non-defense programs.
The change now is a real victory for the House GOP with at least two caveats.
First, to a surprising degree the leadership has replaced spending earmarks with often special interest policy riders that are earmarks themselves in many respects. Coal, oil, paper and pulp companies, timber and Wall Street all were players behind the scene.
Second, the party is still struggling and prone to shortcuts as it copes with the caps set in August for security funding and defense.
Overseas contingency funds, ostensibly for military operations in Afghanistan and other theaters, have become a safety valve to pay for an ever larger share of core Pentagon costs. And much as Republicans have criticized Obama?s decision to bring more American forces home, the resulting savings have helped the GOP sustain what has become a very costly military ? amid spending cuts elsewhere.
The same war savings have also helped the GOP leadership steer around the problem of explaining the extra disaster aid money allowed under the August accords?outside the budget caps.
Prior to Friday, Congress had already approved about $2.4 billion in such assistance, and on a separate 351-67 vote Friday, the House approved an additional $8.1 billion for FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers to deal with the aftermath of flooding and storms this past year.
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