Senate likely to join House in putting off decisions on spending bills
After the House chose last week to punt rather than work out the remaining differences on fiscal 2003 bills, the Senate is expected this week to pass a continuing resolution that will keep the government operating under fiscal 2002 levels through Jan. 11 and leave the spending bills unfinished.
The decision to avoid decisions on spending bills was a serious blow to appropriators, who had hoped to use the lame-duck session to wrap up 11 of the 13 appropriations bills-all but Defense and Military Construction-that have not yet been signed into law.
Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., voiced his preference late last week to finish a few of the easier bills, but the House's passage of a CR and its subsequent exit quashed such plans.
In justifying their exit, House and Senate Republican leaders said they did not want to deal with appropriations bills in the aftermath of the election, which has confused the question of Senate control. Instead, Republicans will reconvene in January, when they will control both houses of Congress as well as the White House.
But the decisions on the 2003 bills still have to be made-meaning appropriators will spend the next two months trying to work out some type of an agreement.
Republican leaders, looking to start anew, want the bills wrapped up either by early January or by the time of the president's State of the Union address, so that Capitol Hill's focus can shift toward the president's priorities rather than leftovers from the 107th Congress.
But how the spending bills will eventually be resolved remained unclear a week into the lame duck, as appropriators and the White House had yet to agree to a top-line spending number from which the appropriations bills could be written.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Fla., and incoming Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, met Friday with President Bush, but no agreement was reached on spending or how to proceed.