Congress is closing in on a final spending deal in the last week of the lame duck session, Politico reports. Negotiations between the Republican House and the Democratic Senate on appropriations are nearly complete, and the impending deal would be, according to senior congressional reporter David Rogers, “a personal triumph” for the top appropriators in each house, Republican Hal Rogers of Kentucky and Democrat Barbara Mikulski of Maryland.
Politico’s Rogers explains how the appropriators, mostly behind closed doors, spent the weekend negotiating policy riders—amendments attached to the spending bill to change or influence policy—on a number of issues, from transportation regulations to child nutrition standards. But, as Mickey Kaus notes, one policy dispute of particular interest to Republicans has been all but ignored by Hal Rogers and GOP appropriators:
So everyone gets riders except opponents of executive amnesty http://t.co/jCzMhr5jxa
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) December 8, 2014
To be sure, appropriators have thrown a bone to immigration hawks. “To appease the right,” Politico reports, “the Department of Homeland Security will be kept on a short leash so Republicans can revisit the issue of Obama’s executive order on immigration.”
Conservatives continue to urge congressional Republicans to use the December 11 funding deadline as a tool to fight back against the action on immigration. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, a GOP House member and senator-elect from Arkansas, told radio host Laura Ingraham on Friday that Americans opposed to the executive order should flood the Capitol Hill switchboards and urge their representatives to support a tougher response.
“Congress needs to take action using the strongest power that we have which is the spending power under the Constitution to stop President Obama’s unlawful amnesty decree,” Cotton said, according to National Review Online. “Pass a short-term funding measure, try to defund these measures now, put the Senate Democrats on record, and then simply fund the government in the new year . . . then we can take action to defund the specific executive overreaches.”
Or, as Politico’s David Rogers put it, “Republicans are furious with the president for having used his executive authority to pre-empt them on immigration reform. And in a bit of tit-for-tat, the GOP is eager to flex its new muscle over the power of the purse.”
So far, House leadership does not appear to be in a flexing mood. Under the current funding plan, DHS appropriations will be funded through early next year, when Republicans will have a larger majority in the House and a new majority in the Senate. But House speaker John Boehner has refused to commit to “revisiting” funding for the DHS next year, saying it’s just one of multiple options for blocking President Obama’s executive order.
