Harry Reid pulled the omnibus spending bill after Republicans began to abandon it. Dems concede budget fight to GOP

Senate Democrats abruptly abandoned an omnibus budget bill for the coming year, pushing major spending decisions into the next Congress and giving Republicans immense new leverage to confront President Barack Obama priorities.

The decision Thursday night sweeps away months of bipartisan work by the Senate Appropriations Committee which had crafted the $1.1 trillion bill to meet spending targets embraced by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) himself prior to the elections.


Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), an old McConnell friend, worked actively to round up as many as nine potential Republican votes for the compromise. But these numbers rapidly evaporated amid personal attacks and the uproar this week over spending earmarks in the package.

McConnell, embarrassed by reports on his own earmarks in the omnibus, went to the Senate floor Thursday to propose a one-page, “clean,” two-month extension of the current stop-gap funding resolution that has kept the government funded since Oct. 1. And as if caught with their hands in the cookie jar, he and other top Republicans vowed to do everything in their powers to kill the omnibus to square themselves with their tea party backers.

Even the typically social Thursday Group lunch among Republicans was punctuated by sharp exchanges, and hours later, an unsuspecting and still hopeful Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye proved prophetic in a hallway interview.

“As of this morning, we had enough,” the Hawaii Democrat told two reporters. “I don’t know what is going to happen tonight.”

With the government lurching toward a funding cutoff Saturday night, Washington faces a genuine fiscal crisis — at once serious and rich in political farce.

Democrats have only themselves to blame for failing to pass any of the 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the day-to-day operations of the government. At the same time, Republicans contributed mightily to this failure and are going through their own culture war — torn between the Senate’s old-bull pork-barrel ways and the more temperate fiscal gospel of their new tea party allies.

Adding to the GOP’s worries is the agitation on the right over the high cost and impact on the deficit of a post-election compromise that its Senate leadership struck with Obama — authorizing more than $850 billion in tax and unemployment benefits.

That bill, swiftly approved by the Senate this week, was truly its own revenue version of the spending omnibus, pulling diverse tax provisions together with little debate and including costly new estate tax relief that in the past could never muster 60 Senate votes — a standard threshold demanded by McConnell.

Killing the spending bill now is a short-term victory for the Republican leader and solidifies him with the House GOP leadership, who will control the appropriations process come January and are most eager to test their powers against Obama.

But in truth, McConnell had encouraged the omnibus effort before the election and even after Nov. 2, he continued to hedge his bets, never taking out his estimated $112.8 million in spending earmarks, nor pulling back old friends like Bennett working on behalf of the measure.

His Thursday speech amounted to his second Claude Rains “Casablanca” moment of this week: the French police captain “shocked, shocked” that there’s gambling in Rick’s Café. “It’s unbelievable, really,” McConnell protested about the omnibus. “They want us to ram this gigantic, trillion-dollar bill through Congress — and they’re using the Christmas break as an inducement to get us to vote for it.”

Beyond the theatrics, McConnell’s shift — and his work behind the scenes to pull back Republican votes Thursday — does harden the political lines.

As a fallback, the House last week narrowly approved a yearlong, stripped-down continuing resolution, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) conceded this also can’t get the 60 votes to cut off debate.

For the White House, this is the worst case scenario because of the potential for another disruptive “shut down the government” veto fight in February, even as the president is trying to roll out his new budget for 2012.

The GOP paid a heavy price when it did the same in 1995 to then President Bill Clinton, but Obama isn’t without risks. The great mistake Republicans made in 1995 was to bring another issue — Medicare — into the appropriations standoff. But if the GOP learns and simply cuts spending, Obama will find it harder to veto the bill for fear he will be accused of shutting down the government himself.

Ironically, the man he will need most then is Inouye, someone the White House didn’t help in this fight.

Two Cabinet departments most impacted are Defense and State. In what proved a vain effort, Defense Secretary Robert Gates weighed in during a White House appearance on Thursday again in support of the omnibus. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later urged her former Senate colleagues to find compromise on the bill.

“We need these resources now more than ever to support national security priorities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where we are helping secure gains made by our military and preventing the spread of violent extremism,” Clinton said. “Our budget is being used to help stabilize the global economy, combat extreme poverty, demolish transnational criminal networks, stop global health pandemics and address the threat of climate change.”

“These are not partisan issues; they are national imperatives,” Clinton said.