Senate extends budget enforcement measures
After months of haggling, the Senate Wednesday night cleared a resolution by unanimous consent extending various budget enforcement mechanisms, including pay/go rules that expired at the end of September.
To avert a prolonged debate on the measure, Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., and ranking member Pete Domenici, R-N.M., cut a deal with Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, so that the rules would only extend through April 15, not the end of fiscal 2003, as originally planned.
Gramm had threatened to hold up the measure by trying to attach provisions that would make it easier to make tax cuts permanent. But Domenici suggested extending it only until April 15, the date when the Senate is supposed to finish work on its own budget resolution, as a means of pressuring whichever party is in charge next year to finish the resolution on time.
The Senate failed this year to complete a budget resolution, making the measure to extend enforcement procedures necessary in the first place.
Under a new resolution, the rules and points of order could be changed or extended further.
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