The Dump and Run Congress

The Dump and Run Congress

December 1, 2006

Next week, the 109th Congress returns for a final lame-duck session. “Unfortunately, now that the election is over,” lawmakers “don’t seem inclined to do any work.” “In a blend of pique and laziness,” members of the House and Senate “intend to show up and pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running at a basic level for a few more weeks.” “They’ll dump everything else onto” the 110th Congress and leave Washington “one week earlier than previously anticipated.” The current leadership is “preparing to walk away from their most basic constitutional responsibility—passing a budget”—to allow themselves to “run out early.” After the American people dumped the 109^th Congress, they are now dumping their remaining responsibilities on the 110^th.

• The 109^th Congress will leave town without completing crucial business. The leadership has “decided to punt their annual spending bills until next year,” a step that will dump “almost a half-trillion dollars of spending bills” on incoming lawmakers. The move would leave the new Congress “with the responsibility of passing the nine remaining spending bills, totaling almost $500 billion for government programs ranging from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the national parks.” Passing the remaining bills should not be this difficult. “In 1994,” GovExec.com reports, “when Republicans swept back to power in the House after four decades, there was no spending mess to clean up—all appropriations bills had been enacted by the Democrats before the end of the fiscal year.”
  
  

• In a final desperate act, the right-wing is using their final week in power to push through an agenda meant to be a “last bid for loyalty” to their base. One bill conservatives will push, the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, “defines a 20-week-old fetus as a ‘pain-capable unborn child.’” The 20-week mark is “a highly controversial threshold among scientists.” The bill mandates that abortion providers “inform the mothers that evidence exists that the procedure would cause pain to the child and offer the mothers anesthesia for the baby.” The legislation is a “grotesque combination of pseudoscience, propaganda,” and “big government.”
  
  

• The lack of action by the current Congress will add to the workload of the incoming Congress. The “bulging workload” left behind by the 109^th Congress may force the 110^th Congress to “consume time and energy” it would otherwise spend on “raising the minimum wage, negotiating lower drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries, cutting interest rates on college loans, and repealing some tax breaks for oil companies.” Conservatives hope the “unfinished budget work” will “gum up” the January agenda.