It’s been more than two decades since Congress was able to pass on time the dozen individual spending bills that fund the U.S. government.
Senate lawmakers say they plan to end the stalemate this year by passing into law at least some of the appropriations legislation that has long stalled due to deep partisan differences on spending and policy issues.
Lawmakers in both parties have pinned their hopes on newly minted Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who took over the panel this month after Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., retired.
Shelby is determined to reform the mangled spending process in Congress, he told the Washington Examiner, and plans to move up to five spending bills beginning in June.
“We are trying to go to regular order and to work in a bipartisan way to get appropriations bills moving,” Shelby said. “We are going to try four or five bills. We are going to try hard. We’ll have to see how it works.”
Shelby’s Democratic counterpart on the panel is Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the ranking member.
Leahy told the Washington Examiner he, too, thinks the Senate can pass some of the bills.
The top leaders in the Senate from both parties have been meeting with Shelby and Leahy, plotting a course to allow bipartisan passage of appropriations measures, Leahy said.
“We are committed to it,” Leahy said. “We know how to do it right; we know how to do it wrong. We are going to do it right.”
Leahy said he and Shelby would “announce very soon” a list of the spending bills they plan to advance.
It would represent a complete turnaround from last year, when the Senate didn’t pass a single appropriations bill mostly due to partisan differences over domestic and military spending levels.
The gridlock led to Congress funding the government with a string of short-term spending bills called continuing resolutions, or CRs, some lasting only a few days.
Congress finally bundled all government spending into a $1.3 trillion omnibus package in March to pay for the remaining six months of the fiscal year.
The varied funding tactics have made it difficult for government to function, and it leads to wasteful spending because there is less scrutiny of each government budget.
The $1.3 trillion omnibus was more than 2,000 pages long, and lawmakers had only hours to read it.
Government departments are also left without the ability to plan, which has been especially debilitating for the military.
The fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, and few believe it will be possible to pass all 12 spending bills into law. But lawmakers believe they can pass at least a handful of them, which will open the door to eventually going back to full regular order and perhaps the passage of all 12 bills, which last occurred in 1994.
The remaining bills would likely be rolled into one package, or “minibus,” a smaller version of an omnibus.
Lawmakers are more optimistic this year because both parties have already agreed to domestic and defense spending levels for the 2019 fiscal year.
Such an accord was missing in fiscal 2018, leading to the logjam in the Senate. Democrats wanted equal military and domestic spending, while Republicans were pitching legislation that gave more to the military.
The House, led by Republicans, passed all 12 appropriations bills with a simple majority. But in the Senate, Democrats united against the measures over the reduced domestic spending and used the power of the filibuster to block the bills from even coming up for debate.
This year, with the spending totals already set, Democrats said they can see a path forward on the spending legislation.
Both parties are eager to heal the longstanding rift, perhaps as a way to slow the growing partisanship that has gripped the chamber in recent years.
“Think about it,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Appropriations Committee. “Twelve bills coming to the floor, subject to debate. It will be like the Senate of old. I would say, that is the confidence-builder. We have to get back to legislating on the floor, and that will build up more bipartisanship and camaraderie and trust.”
