If you need more evidence the D.C. swamp continues to thrive, look no further than the Senate.
Two votes in the last two weeks have indicated the extent to which the status quo remains safely ensconced in the upper chamber, where partisan self-protection and deference to special interests governs everything.
Consider the fate of President Trump’s $15 billion rescission bill. Trump’s proposed package of spending cuts were introduced by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who was tired of waiting for his party leadership to get around to it.
The proposal seemed on track to pass until Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., out of nowhere, registered an objection and took down the entire bill. Burr’s excuse? He wasn’t guaranteed a vote on his amendment to remove a favored spending program from the bill.
On its face, this is a reasonable objection. That is, until you look at the details. As part of the process for considering a rescissions bill in the Senate, the chamber has to go into vote-a-rama — a process where an unlimited number of amendments can be offered by any senator.
You read that right. Burr voted down the first significant rescissions package in decades because he was supposedly not guaranteed an amendment vote, in a process that allows for unlimited amendments. Is anyone else confused?
We can only speculate about what motivated Burr to play the malcontent. It’s no secret the president’s rescissions package was unpopular in the Senate, where appropriators, senators in charge of government funding bills, were openly irritated with the president for seeking to cut funds they wanted to spend elsewhere. Conveniently, Burr is also retiring, and will face no consequences for killing a bill designed to make meaningful spending cuts.
Perhaps Burr really was moved by a desire to cement a guarantee on top of an already-guaranteed amendment free-for-all (one assumes he would have been granted it). Or perhaps he made himself the spoiler on behalf of some Senate friends who wanted to see the rescissions process fail, but unlike Burr, did not have the electoral freedom to be seen casting a decisive nay vote. Either way, the Senate swamp wins, with Richard Burr as its Trojan horse.
Earlier in the week, the Senate swamp stalked to the floor against Lee’s amendment to redefine an Environmental Protection Agency regulatory policy known as the Waters of the U.S, (or by its very-DC acronym, WOTUS). The WOTUS policy has been causing trouble for decades, plaguing landowners with fines of $75,000 a day for building on their own dry property, sending an 80-year old Massachusetts cranberry farmer into 22 years of litigation, and turning ditches that occasionally fill with rainwater into federally managed property. Lee’s amendment would simply have voided the regulation.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was having none of it. Despite having voted numerous times in support of the policy Lee was proposing, McConnell declared it detrimental and inappropriate to the appropriations process, allegedly telling Lee the vote would be too political, allowing vulnerable Democrats to support a good policy on the eve of the midterms.
But it didn’t stop there. Not only did McConnell pressure Lee to withdraw the amendment, he declared, bizarrely, that considering this single amendment would upend the entire appropriations process. That is, if an amendment on WOTUS were allowed a vote, suddenly the Senate couldn’t have regular order. “This amendment needs to be tabled because this is not the right place to offer it,” McConnell told senators.
After making clear the Senate would surely burn if it had to take this vote, McConnell called up Lee’s amendment, moved to kill it, and forced the Senate to vote, thus invalidating every one of his arguments. In particular, the move allowed every vulnerable Democrat senator to vote in favor of saving the amendment (and killing WOTUS), notching their electoral cap with a policy feather.
McConnell’s argument and tactics are as absurd as they are bewildering. Far from being a policy “inappropriate” to the appropriations process, WOTUS-related amendments have been passed as part of appropriations bills for years. Indeed, as recently as fiscal 2016, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a bill containing similar WOTUS provisions. Provisions to block the rule were also included in Senate Appropriations bills in fiscal 2017.
The House has done likewise in previous years. But more importantly, the House also included a full repeal of WOTUS in the appropriations bill it passed in June, making it not only highly relevant to the Senate debate, but well within the scope of conference when the Senate and House meet to hash out their differences.
It’s unclear what McConnell’s parliamentary tantrum did besides force Republicans to vote down an issue they’ve all been on record supporting and give Democrats a vote they will now promote on the campaign trail. It was swamp politics, to be sure, but also poorly played.
Political self-preservation, back-slapping, and palm greasing have been the modus operandi of the Senate for years, and despite Republicans adopting a “drain the swamp” attitude, nothing in the Senate has really changed. If anything, when it comes to the upper chamber, the swamp is still firmly in charge.
Rachel Bovard (@rachelbovard) is policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute.
