The pivotal vote followed a day of sharply partisan exchanges. | Photo courtesy of USFWS Duck stamp debate latest dysfunction

Tony Motley, a former U.S. ambassador to Brazil and great pal of the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, often joked of writing a Washington novel someday with the title “Beyond the Merits.”

But who could have guessed the Senate would beat him to the punch, penning the first chapter itself Monday night when the “world’s greatest deliberative body” derailed a popular sportsmen’s bill because of a fight over how to count a proposed $10 increase in the price of duck stamps?


Here was a bipartisan bill backed by a rare marriage of conservation and gun groups and boasting endorsements from the White House and National Rifle Association — not exactly political bedfellows. It came to the Senate floor just three weeks after national elections in which both parties swore they had learned a lesson that the American people wanted them to work together.

But down it went — and all because of duck stamps, those artful engravings sold by the government since 1934 as a way for hunters and increasingly conservationists to support wetlands for migratory water fowl.

All this in, well, a lame-duck session.

“I was surprised and I was hugely disappointed as an American that they could not cooperate on a hugely bipartisan bill. It’s an embarrassment,” said Vaughn Collins, legislative director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a centrist coalition of sportsmen groups.

“We got caught in the crossfire,” said one lobbyist working on behalf of the package. “This had nothing to do with the bill. It was a bigger fight.”

Indeed the pivotal vote on the fatal point of order followed a day of sharply partisan exchanges on the Senate floor in which Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) mixed it up with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over proposed changes in the Senate’s filibuster rules. When the roll call began at 5:30, proponents soon realized they were in trouble as a handful of Republican allies switched their votes. And while Reid vainly kept the roll call open for more than an hour, he ended up at 50-44 — 10 votes short of the 60 needed to secure the required budget waiver.

Tuesday afternoon, talks began to try to break the impasse. But precious time and political momentum have been lost forever. The whole incident speaks volumes about the level of partisan dysfunction in the Senate, even as Congress and the White House face huge year-end decisions regarding taxes and spending.

As raised by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the budget violation was highly technical and goes to the question of how to allocate revenues and spending among Senate committees under the Budget Control Act adopted in 2011.

The Energy and Natural Resources, and Environment and Public Works committees are each affected by the sportsmen’s bill, but Sessions opted to take aim first at the duck stamps — which fall under the Environment panel since it has jurisdiction for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Hunters who are 16 and older buy the stamps each season to affix to their state license, a federal requirement since the ducks and geese are migrating, after all, across state lines. The cost is less than a box of cartridges and the whole program has blossomed into something much larger than just hunting.

The design of the stamp is the subject of a national competition among waterfowl artists and even enjoyed a bit part in the movie “Fargo.” The Interior Department boasts that a $400 investment in stamps over the years could now be worth $5,000 to collectors.

The current $15 price hasn’t gone up since 1991 even as land prices have soared, thanks to the boom in the farm economy. There has been a tripling in the per-acre costs paid by the government in acquiring wetlands for protection, and the legislation seeks to give the Interior Department more flexibility in setting the price of the stamps to manage the program.

The general consensus from the debate has been that the $15 price would go up to $25. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated this would generate $132 million in new revenues and associated spending over the next decade. CBO has also said the net impact on the deficit is a modest improvement. But because of the added revenues and spending in the jurisdiction of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, the bill is exposed to a point of order.

Republicans insist there was merit to all of this.

Going into the famous “fiscal cliff” talks, Sessions said it was all the more important to stick to the letter of the law, however obscure. “When we make an agreement, I think we ought to adhere to it,” he told the Senate, and his Republican colleagues agreed even as they gave often wildly different explanations of what the point of order was actually about.

“We don’t have a budget. We have the Budget Control Act that creates some caps on spending, and we ought to abide by those or they are meaningless,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.).

“So they make a budget agreement and you shouldn’t enforce it? That’s what’s insane,” added Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.). “Is that going to get us out of the fiscal hole?”