Of train wreck, omnibus, and playing chicken
Who will blink first, the train wreck, the omnibus, or the chicken?
Congressional Quarterly (subscription required) reports that:
The House Appropriations Committee will officially change its subcommittee alignment on Tuesday, setting up a conflict with the Senate that could make completion of this year’s spending bills even more difficult than usual.
Washington-speak for when House and Senate cannot come to terms is a train wreck:
the last of which (in 1995) spectacularly and painfully …
… shut down the Federal government (including HUD) for several weeks and left political scars all around. Right now the Senate’s cardinals are signaling they are prepared for a train wreck:
The Senate Appropriations Committee has twice rejected the House plan. Under the proposal, Senate GOP subcommittee chairmen would be reshuffled, leaving several senators in charge of less prestigious panels than they headed during the 108th Congress — or squeezed out of a chairmanship altogether.
But the House is also so signaling it too is prepared for train wreck:
But [House Appropriations Chair Jerry] Lewis is moving forward, perhaps calculating that the Senate will have little choice but to go along or face appropriations gridlock.
For a while, the bull elephants can face down one another:
With HUD (which will go to Transportation-Treasury) caught in the middle:
Most notably, the five House subcommittees that will absorb jurisdiction from the disbanded VA-HUD panel would likely have a difficult time in conference negotiations as they attempted to reconcile their bills with Senate measures with different components.
In a normal world, the House and Senate have the same appropriations subcommittee structure, so that when they conference, each has considered precisely the same matters. Typically a conference first identifies the areas where House and Senate agree, which are adopted without further discussion, to zero in on points of disagreement. “Split the difference” is a common going-in position if not a final result.
If that were to occur here, the unconferenced bills would keep piling up, like frustrated patrons standing in a queue …
… until they have the chance to board a legislative vehicle known as an omnibus budget reconciliation act (OBRA):
Omnibuses are cobbled together at the last minute, usually after a continuing resolution, and the scramble to get onboard can get messy:
Essential to any game of stand-down is time to glare, and the Congress has that:
For the time being, the mismatch may have little practical effect.
The $82 billion supplemental fiscal 2005 spending request submitted by President Bush on Monday will be handled at the full committee level. And several of the fiscal 2006 spending bills — including those for agriculture, homeland security and foreign aid — will be produced by House and Senate subcommittees with matching jurisdiction.
So who will blink?
“It’s the ultimate game of chicken,” said a former House Appropriations aide. “They are going over the cliff, and it’s not reversible.”
As Scott Glenn said in The Hunt for Red October, “The hard part about playing chicken, is knowing when to flinch.”
