Spending bills stacked up in Senate

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., will face the crunch of the legislative calendar that he has anticipated when the Senate comes back into session Sept. 4.

With the end of the fiscal year looming at the end of September, Daschle still needs to get nine appropriations bills passed, while tackling a number of key Democratic priorities before the end of the session.

Daschle has avoided laying out a new adjournment date--although he has already stated emphatically that the target adjournment date of Oct. 6 will have to fall.

The first order of business when the Senate returns will be reauthorization of the Export Administration Act. Under a unanimous consent agreement reached before the August recess, Daschle will not force a cloture vote until Sept. 7, the end of the post-recess week. The following week, according to Daschle's spokeswoman, the Senate is likely to return to fiscal 2002 appropriations bills, although Daschle has not determined which bill will come up first.

New budgetary estimates and policy battles could frustrate any timetable that Daschle sets.

On the FY02 Transportation appropriations bill, which the Senate passed before the recess, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Phil Gramm, R-Texas, have vowed to continue to slow progress because of its contentious language on regulation of Mexican trucks. Daschle will need to schedule at least three more votes in order to get the bill through a House- Senate conference committee.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., predicted that with defense and education spending levels for FY02 yet to be finalized--and the mid-session review numbers widely expected to show a smaller surplus than what was projected in the FY02 budget resolution--September "is going to be a train wreck."

Appropriators have been waiting for conferees on the education reform bill to set funding authorization levels before writing the FY02 Labor-HHS appropriations bill, while action on the FY02 Defense spending bill was delayed as appropriators waited for the administration to submit its amendment to the defense spending request.