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  • The Week on the Hill

The House and Senate floors this week were dominated by little scuffles over minor bills that had the feel of busywork in a fourth-grade classroom while the teacher grades tests. The Senate spent much of the week on legislation tweaking federal highway projects, while the House tinkered with the tax code and shored up student loans.

But off the floors, in members’ offices and committee rooms and hideaways, lawmakers were grinding away, making sweeping changes to a wide swath of federal policy. All the activity kept the Capitol’s hallways buzzing, despite the relative quiet in the House and Senate chambers.

Away from the din of the presidential campaign, Congress behind the scenes has been slogging through major, controversial legislation—involving farm and environmental policy, Iraq war funding and intelligence surveillance, and the economy—that will spark vigorous floor debates this spring and summer. Some of the measures in the works might even become law, giving Democrats and Republicans results to brag about during their re-election campaigns this fall.

On April 16, the House Ways and Means Committee worked on legislation extending unemployment benefits for up to six months, a key proposal in Democratic plans for helping Americans deal with the struggling economy. The House Financial Services Committee, meanwhile, pushed forward on a massive package designed to assist millions of homeowners facing foreclosure—following Senate passage last week of similar legislation aimed at the faltering housing market.

The Senate Appropriations Committee kicked off debate on a $100 billion-plus war-funding measure with testimony from Office of Management and Budget Director Jim Nussle, as appropriators in both chambers weighed their options for attaching domestic spending—including the unemployment benefits—to the war bill. Agriculture Committee lawmakers and tax writers met to hash out differences between the two chambers’ versions of a nearly $600 billion farm bill. Other House-Senate negotiators tried behind closed doors to break logjams on consumer product safety legislation, a rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the fiscal 2009 budget resolution.

“We’ve had a great deal of back-and-forth,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said of his discussions with House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., and key senators, including Evan Bayh of Indiana, the only Democrat to vote against the Senate’s budget resolution last month. “We’re at the stage of talking to individual members.”

Even climate-change legislation—once widely assumed to have little chance of approval before 2009—got two boosts in recent weeks. On April 10, the Congressional Budget Office reported that a bill pending in the Senate setting up a cap-and-trade pollution-reduction system would not cost the federal government any money. And on April 16, President Bush signaled his willingness to work with Congress on climate-change legislation this year.

On matters ranging from agriculture to the economy, budget worries are the key stumbling blocks for lawmakers hoping to show results to voters this fall.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., whose panel approved a bipartisan climate-change bill in December, disagreed with the specifics of Bush’s proposal but seemed to appreciate the overture. “Even [administration officials], who’ve been the most-forward opponents of doing a thing, are backing doing something,” she said. “I take it as wind at my back.… We’re certainly going to take it as far as we can.”

The no-cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office is particularly helpful to Boxer, because other members are finding that high price tags are tripping up their legislation this spring. The problems stem from the “pay-as-you-go” rules that Democrats have imposed on themselves requiring budgetary offsets for any new entitlement spending increases or tax cuts.

Democrats have had difficulty finding budget fat to trim, especially after Bush blocked many of their proposed spending increases last year. Republicans, for their part, contend that Democrats typically propose tax hikes, rather than spending cuts, to meet the “paygo” rules.

Last year, controversy over the rules tied up agreements on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, energy legislation, and alternative minimum tax relief. Now the paygo requirements have bogged down the farm bill, with House and Senate lawmakers differing on how to pay for its various proposals.

If Congress simply extended the 2002 farm bill, it would cost $597 billion over 10 years—including food stamps and other nutrition programs, which account for 66 percent—and farm leaders have tentatively been eyeing a boost of $10 billion over 10 years. Some of the offsets that members floated to fund the farm spending were also suggested as offsets for the housing legislation moving through the House Financial Services Committee.

Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that offsets included in the House version of housing legislation are likely to face opposition from the Senate—which passed a $20 billion housing package without any offsets. “I would imagine that this [offsets issue] will be one of the three, four, five most difficult issues in conference,” Greenstein said.

Disputes over paygo are also tripping up agreement on the fiscal 2009 budget resolution, which would set spending limits for the annual appropriations bills. After Congress in February passed the $150 billion economic stimulus package of tax rebates for individuals and tax cuts for businesses—the main legislative accomplishment so far this year—Democratic deficit hawks in the House insisted that they didn’t want additional legislation to go through Congress without corresponding offsets.

The House-passed budget resolution outlined offsets for various proposals. But Senate Democrats are willing to waive the paygo rules. “It’s very, very hard,” Conrad said of resolving the matter. “A lot of people have drawn lines in the sand.”

Indeed, it is largely differences between the House and the Senate—rather than differences between the two parties—that are bogging down negotiations on the Hill this month.

On a rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Senate earlier this year reached a bipartisan deal that provides immunity to telecommunications companies that have aided the Bush administration’s surveillance efforts, a policy that House Democrats have opposed. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., has become an ambassador conducting shuttle diplomacy between the two chambers in an effort to break the impasse.

In addition, consumer product safety and mental health bills have moved through the House and Senate with bipartisan support, but significant policy differences remain between the two chambers that must be reconciled.

So what has spurred the increased bipartisanship—and potentially increased legislative output—on the Hill this year as compared with last year? Most likely, it was the loud gripes of voters back home in 2007 about congressional gridlock, coupled with the significant pressure that lawmakers feel to respond to the economic downturn.

In the Senate, Democrats complain that during the 110th Congress Republicans have forced them to push most legislation over the 60-vote hurdle needed to invoke cloture and break filibusters. Democrats have only a 51-49 majority—counting Sens. Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who caucus with the Democrats—and last year they failed to reach the 60-vote threshold on numerous measures. But this year, Republicans have joined Democrats to surpass 60 votes on nine of the 13 cloture motions that the Senate has considered. On the four cloture motions on which Democrats failed to reach 60 votes, the Senate nonetheless subsequently passed the underlying legislation after Democrats agreed to GOP demands.

“Frequently, cloture is invoked in order to advance bills, not to slow them down,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on April 15. “They’re not always for the purpose of preventing things from going forward.”

Nonetheless, even as they appear to be on the verge of reaching agreement on several significant bills, the two parties can’t resist taking potshots at each other. McConnell and other Republicans accused Democrats on tax day, April 15, of raising taxes in the fiscal 2009 budget resolution. And Democrats accused Republicans of continuing to block legislation.

“At a time when people are demanding change, obstruction doesn’t work and it won’t work politically,” Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said. He predicted that the GOP would block more Democratic proposals throughout the year, noting, “We’ve still got four or five months—and many bills—to go.”