The Senate today slogged toward dueling votes -- which could come as soon as the wee hours of tomorrow -- on the House-passed government funding bill, which cuts $3 billion from U.S. EPA, and a Democratic plan that avoids much of that financial hurt on the agency.
The uncertain timing for the side-by-side test votes came amid heated speculation over the next step in long-term budget talks among the two parties and the White House. Neither Republican nor Democratic senators are expected to maintain party unity on their respective funding measures of choice, and neither the House's $60 billion in overall spending cuts nor the Senate Democrats' $10.5 billion alternative is considered likely to win support from 60 members of the upper chamber.
"They're the ones who wanted to move to" the House's seven-month continuing resolution (CR), which cleared on Feb. 19, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters. "Now they're trying to walk that backwards. ... They cannot stop us from having a vote on [the House CR]. We want the American people to know that [the House CR] is dead, and we'll get there."
Environmental groups and Democrats have savaged the House CR for its massive cuts to EPA and Energy Department efficiency and renewables programs, accusing the lower chamber's GOP majority of setting back Obama administration environmental and research efforts to score political points. Republicans, meanwhile, are intent on securing broad government spending cuts for the current fiscal year as a down payment on further progress scaling back the nation's $1.6 trillion deficit.
"I'm not sure there's a path" to long-term agreement currently visible, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), an Appropriations Committee member, told reporters. "You could probably have a plethora of amendments [to the current CR proposals] and probably not solve the problem."
Indeed, regardless of the political dramas set to unfold on the Senate floor as members of both parties consider defecting on the competing CRs, signs on Capitol Hill today pointed toward approval of another short-term funding bill to stave off a government shutdown. The current law keeping federal coffers open is set to expire March 18, and House Republicans have said they are prepared to bring up another stopgap measure with incremental funding cuts -- the last iteration lasted for two weeks and cut $4 billion, including earmarked money at DOE.
"I wouldn't be surprised" if another stopgap CR is sent over to the Senate as the spending debate continues to unfold, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters.
On the individual level, Senate Democrats aimed to focus their public message on the impact of specific programs sliced by the House CR, while their GOP counterparts depicted the side-by-side votes as a choice between the two parties' broad spending-cut targets.
"[T]here's a frustration there hasn't been enough discussion about what's been put in this House bill," said Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska). "And I think there's not been a discussion more about what the priorities are. We spend more time talking about how much money" should be cut from the budget.
"The way we're looking at this vote is that it's a clear signal that we support the number that the House of Representatives has picked in trying to get this deficit under control," Senate Republicans' conference chairman, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, told reporters.
Pressed to explain how Republican senators could portray their members' vote for the House CR as an endorsement of numbers rather than specific cuts, Alexander said: "[E]veryone knows the Senate's going to reserve to itself its own prerogative about what our priorities are within the reduced level of spending."
At the heart of the priorities debate is the question of whether to impose policy riders on EPA's greenhouse gas emissions rules and other pending agency regulations.
Senate Democrats have maintained a united front against adding riders to government funding bills, and the House's most recent two-week CR omitted such policy restrictions -- but the No. 2 leader in the lower chamber declined to tip his hand on the matter today.
"We have established a formula or construct for the interim stopgap CRs, if that is where we end up and discussions about riders and policy issues are ongoing," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said today.
Reporters Sarah Abruzzese and Katie Howell contributed.
