Black smoke from the cardinals’ chimney?
Restructuring appropriations subcommittees has come to a screeching (temporary?) halt as the Senate’s cardinals (as senior appropriations senators are known) have
rejected their House counterparts’ proposal (report from Congressional Quarterly, subscription required):
“The House proposal doesn’t appear to be acceptable to . . . basically anybody on the Appropriations Committee,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who would stand to lose his chairmanship of the Commerce, Justice, State and the Judiciary Subcommittee under the plan. “The consensus in the room was . . . that the proposal the House had wasn’t going to work for us and we’ll see where we go from here.”
Right now the old bull elephants are trumpeting at one another across the Capitol:
The rebuff came a day after House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., announced he would press ahead with the reorganization plan.
Of course, legislators who negotiate all the time may be negotiating here …
[T]he Senate may be trying to increase its leverage if negotiations resume in earnest.
… which is more possible since there is no immediate external pressure to agree:
Since any work in the Senate on fiscal 2006 spending bills is still months away, it is plain that senators feel no rush to meet any House deadline.
Speculations as to motives abound, especially from minority members enjoying their schadenfreude:
Rep. David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the Appropriations panel, said [House Majority Leader Tom] DeLay required Lewis to dissolve the VA-HUD Subcommittee because senior GOP appropriators crossed DeLay last year on the NASA budget.
