Half Changed World

I was absolutely flabbergasted yesterday afternoon when I heard that the House had voted down the conference agreement on the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill.  This is just unheard of — apparently it is the first time the Republican leadership has lost a floor vote since they took over control of Congress in 1994.

This doesn’t mean that they win on every issue (althoug they often do), but that they usually have counted votes well enough to know whether a bill will pass, and don’t bring it up for a floor vote until they know that it will get through.  (That’s why the big budget reconciliation bill wasn’t brought up last week– they negotiated behind the scenes until they had made enough changes to get the 217 votes they needed.)  And since they control the Rules committee, they can prevent Democrats from offering amendments that might peel Republicans away.  So this was pretty shocking.

It’s hard to know what made 21 Republicans finally stand up and oppose the appropriations bill.  There seem to be three main explanations flying around:

• The Republican leadership is arguing that it’s because they didn’t include any earmarks in the bill, funds reserved for projects in individual members’ districts.  They’ve long been used as a way to sweeten the pot for a waivering representative.
• Another story is that it’s because Tom Delay isn’t the Majority leader, and that Blunt isn’t as successful at keeping the party members in line as he was.  It’s certainly hard to imagine that Delay wouldn’t have counted votes more accurately.
• The version that has Democrats humming under their breath is the possibility that it’s because of the President’s growing unpopularity.  TAPPED points to a post from Mark Schmitt at The Decembrist, written last Friday:

"A great deal of Bush/Rove/DeLay’s success over the past five years has come from pushing through party-line votes as if they were confidence votes in a parliamentary system. Many of the votes pushed through with massive arm-twisting and unprecedented procedures, such as the Medicare prescription drug bill and the 2003 tax bill, were sold on the basis that the president needs the victory. You may not think this is good policy, wavering Republicans were told, but if the president wins, he gets reelected and we all win; we lose, and our whole edifice of power collapses.

"And just as in a parliamentary system, that works until it stops working. And when it stops working, the government is finished. After reelection, the confidence vote argument lost some steam. Seeing Bush as a burden in 2006 rather than an asset for reelection, it loses still more."

• A final possibility is simply that, in politics as in baseball, no team is ever as good as it looks when it’s winning, or as bad as it looks when it’s losing.

It’s not clear what happens next on the appropriations bill.  The federal fiscal year started in October, so all of the programs for which appropriations haven’t been passed have been running under a "continuing resolution."  The last one expired today, but Congress passed another one to get us into December, and someone was flying it out to the President last night to get it signed. 

The catch is that the continuing resolution funded all programs at the lowest of the FY 2005 level, or the levels proposed by the House and the Senate, which means significant cuts for some programs.  The one that I’ve been paying most attention to is the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG), which the House proposed to cut nearly in half.  (The conference report provided for full funding.)  Some House Republicans yesterday were threatening that they would push for a year long continuing resolution at those levels.  More likely is that Labor-HHS-Ed will get attached to the defense appropriations bill.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 7:07 am and is filed under US Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.