“It’s very unusual for resolutions like this to come immediately to the floor where you have 100 senators voting on it,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, said this week. “Because frankly, not all of us are as up to speed on the details of this, or what the unintended impact might be …”
Cornyn pleaded with colleagues to be patient, to let the measure go through the committee process, where members with expertise would have time to evaluate its consequences, or at least to read it.
Cornyn was not talking, as he might have been, about the 1000-page omnibus spending bill that dropped with a heavy thud onto lawmakers’ desks Wednesday afternoon, just 24 hours before they are scheduled to vote on it. You’d think that this, of almost any bill, would best be voted on only after members of Congress had been given sufficient time to familiarize themselves with its contents.
But no, the legislation Cornyn was urging caution on is an 800-word resolution whose text has been available to all senators since February, in which Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., ask that the Senate put itself on record against continued American involvement in the Saudi bombing of Yemen.
When it came to the massive spending bill that no one has read, Cornyn joined his Republican leadership colleagues to strong-arm lawmakers into a hasty and immediate vote.
A spending bill does have to pass, and not everything in this one is terrible. The provision designed to impose online sales taxes on states’ behalf has been removed, for example. It’s also good federalism to see that budgeted opioid-related and school safety grants are being used to empower states rather than create a national one-size-fits-all program.
But as we’ve repeatedly argued in this space, Congress should not be funding Washington’s activities in this way. It needs regular order to govern well. This omnibus is too big and too opaque to be good legislation, precisely because it’s been created through an irregular process and hurried to the finish line just ahead of a deadline that, if breached, would trigger a federal government shutdown.
The details of appropriations bills should be hammered out on C-SPAN on the House floor or in committees. They should also be finished by Sept. 30 of the preceding fiscal year. They should not be crafted months late, behind closed doors, and then dumped into lawmakers’ laps hours before they’re required to decide yea or nay. Congress should be allowed time to wade through and find all the Easter eggs, and also time to object or remove anything inappropriate.
Republican leaders promised long ago to move individual appropriations bills through the committee process, which is supposed to finish up in September. But here we are again, months late, with lawmakers having to choose between accepting a monster they have not inspected or, in the alternative, being blamed for a government shutdown.
If regular order were observed, a Republican majority would theoretically be able to hold spending down. But the opportunity to do this is being missed again. And partly as a result, there may not be a Republican Congress around to pass the next set of appropriations bills.
