Informed Speculation

Robert Novak has the details:

The Senate Republican leadership met behind closed doors this week to ponder Majority Leader Harry Reid’s audacious power grab on the massive catchall appropriations bill. They decided they could not filibuster the bill for fear of being blamed for closing down the government, but they still wanted enough votes opposing cloture to make an impression. That would seem a formula for defeat, and indeed it was.

The cloture vote to end debate on the bill Tuesday was 71 to 26, with 23 Republicans — including the party’s two leaders — voting with Reid. The GOP was accepting a bill that perpetuates earmarks, masks additional domestic spending under the disguise of fiscal responsibility and establishes a precedent of prohibiting the opposition party from amending an appropriations bill.

The Republican defeat would have been a plausible outcome if Democrats held a commanding Senate majority, even as large as their edge in the House. In fact, the Senate divide is 51 to 49, with Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota hospitalized and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut barely a Democrat. What ails Senate Republicans is lack of principle and lack of will, two reasons they lost the 2006 elections.

At issue are nine appropriations bills, totaling $465 billion, left over from the Republican-controlled Congress. Democrats claimed to propose a continuing resolution (CR) — keeping spending level while beginning work on a new round of money bills for the next fiscal year.

But it was not really a CR. It was an omnibus appropriations bill changing money levels.

After the bill passed the House under procedures that prevented any serious attempts at amendment, Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma went to the floor as the Senate’s leading spending watchdog. He said that “to make the claim that there are no earmarks in this bill is an outright falsehood that the American people should not accept.” He added: “There’s no transparency with these earmarks. Most Americans will never know how they got there. The lobbyists will know, the members [of Congress] will know, the campaign checks that come from them will know, but the regular American Joe won’t know.”

Earmarks aside, Coburn declared that it is “a lie” that “we stay within the budget” in the omnibus bill because $3.1 billion in defense funds have been transferred to domestic programs. He correctly predicted that this money will be appropriated for defense again in the next supplemental money bill “for things that absolutely have to happen with our troops.”

So, the omnibus actually represents a spending increase.

The more you dig around Harry Reid, the more the stench of bad government – and worse – arises.  If James Webb and his proto-socialist “fair trade” accomplices, not to mention the progressive bloggers filling their days decrying a ‘neocon’ movement that has largely come and gone, were really serious about putting forth a new day for government, ending the ‘culture of corruption’, and doing something for the people, they could start by cleaning their own house and confronting the Senate Majority Leader, more known for million-dollar sweetheart real-estate deals and free professional boxing tickets than anything of worth to his constituents or his country…