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CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Oct. 14, 2011 – 10:16 p.m.

Endgame Unclear as Senate Takes Up ‘Minibus’

By Kerry Young, CQ Staff

With a month to go before stopgap spending runs out, congressional leaders have numerous issues to resolve before Congress can wrap up the fiscal 2012 budget cycle.

As the Senate takes up a package with about $128 billion in discretionary spending this week, the leaders have yet to finalize bill-by-bill spending limits, resolve politically tricky policy disputes in some appropriations bills or settle on how to package the bills.

The current stopgap (PL 112-36) runs through Nov. 18, and lawmakers may need another continuing resolution to fund the government past that date while negotiations continue.

Appropriators are waiting for leaders to decide how to divide the $1.043 trillion in discretionary funds allocated for the 12 annual spending bills, a step often referred to as the 302(b) process.

House and Senate leaders also will have to devise a legislative strategy for clearing a spending law. The two likeliest options are packaging small groups of bills into what are called “minibus” measures or writing one catchall omnibus.

That decision could depend on how well the Senate handles its three-bill minibus this week. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., expect bipartisan support for the package, which includes the Agriculture (HR 2112), Commerce-Justice-Science (S 1572) and Transportation-HUD (S 1596) spending bills.

Among those, only the Agriculture measure has seen floor action in the House, and the outcome was far from bipartisan. No Democrats voted for the House version of the bill when it passed 217-203 on June 16, in large part because of the deep cuts it proposed for programs that feed low-income Americans. Nineteen Republicans also voted against the measure, largely because they wanted deeper spending cuts.

So far, Senate leaders have not locked in an agreement to govern the amendment process for the spending package.

Deficit Committee Looms

Appropriators hope to finish work by Nov. 18, both to avoid another stopgap and to beat the deadline for the joint deficit reduction committee to issue its recommendations, said C.W. Bill Young of Florida, chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

If appropriations work stretches into December, lawmakers may need to consider several more stopgap funding measures. That could be problematic for House GOP leaders, who saw a continuing resolution rejected in September in the face of demands by rank-and-file Republicans for deeper spending cuts.

But a November finish remains a tall order, Young said.

“Every day that goes by, I wonder how realistic that might be, but there is no reason that we can’t,” he said, noting that the House passed his Defense spending bill in early July but the Senate never took it up. “The bill has been laying there for three months.”

Endgame Unclear as Senate Takes Up ‘Minibus’

The House has passed six of its 12 bills, while the Senate so far has passed only one, the Military Construction-VA measure (HR 2055).

Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee, said a minibus strategy would likely keep Congress working on spending legislation into December.

“The most likely thing is that we are going to get some of the bills done by November, and the rest after,” he said.

Fattah said he has had initial talks about the measure with Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Subcommittee.

Lawmakers will have to sort out some spending discrepancies between the House and Senate versions of the bill before it can be cleared for the president.

In July, the House Appropriations Committee approved by voice vote a $50.2 billion version of the bill (HR 2596), but it was written in accordance with a $1.019 trillion spending cap set by the GOP’s fiscal 2012 budget resolution (H Con Res 34).

The debt limit agreement (PL 112-25) set a new, higher fiscal 2012 cap of $1.043 trillion, and the Senate spending panel on Sept. 15 approved a $52.7 billion version of the bill.

“The end product will be a bipartisan bill that will responsibly deal with our premier science agencies, NASA and National Science Foundation, and the Justice Department,” Fattah said.

“We will be able to work through our issues.”

For some bills, though, fights about money are complicated by larger ideological issues. A draft House version of the Labor-HHS-Education bill would block funding for the 2010 health care overhaul (PL 111-48, PL 111-52), a move that is anathema to Democrats. The measure also would prohibit funding for Planned Parenthood unless it certifies that it will not provide abortions.

In order to pass the Senate, both of those provisions will need to be stripped out, a move sure to anger House conservatives. That is one of the reasons GOP leaders will likely need Democratic help to eventually clear any measure including funding for the Labor and Health departments.

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