December 5, 2006: Conrad Amdt. and Morning Business Speeches

Conrad finally got a vote on his amendment to the agriculture bill but it did not sustain a point of order...senators railed on Senate leadership for its inability to debate and bring up for vote the remaining appropriations bills...


The Conrad Amendment to the agriculture bill received 57 votes, three shy of the sixty it needed to sustain a budget point of order made against it.  Senator Kent Conrad (ND) said that three senators who would have supported his amendment were not present and he would be back for another vote on the amendment, either this week or in the next congress. I do find it interesting that Conrad got his vote for an appropriations bill (agriculture) that the Senate will not even be debating and voting on.

The process by which this amendment fell is complicated.  The point of order requiring the record vote was a point of order arguing that the emergency designation on Conrad's amendment violated the congressional budget act.  So the vote required 60 senators willing to waive the budget act's contrictures on what could or couldn't be called "emergency" spending.  The amendment received only 57 votes, and so the constrictures could not be waived, and the emergency designation was stricken.  But then Sen. Bennett (UT) raised what I might call a regular "point of order" and the amendment was ruled "out of order."  I believe that this "out of order" finding means that the amendment was not germane to the underlying bill, which I find a little hard to believe, considering the underlying bill is an ag bill.  

Now morning business speeches.  Both Sens. Arlen Specter (PA) and Robert Byrd (WV) have castigated the Senate leadership for its inability to bring the remaining appropriations bills up for debate.

Sen. George Voinovich wished his colleague and friend Mike DeWine (OH) goodbye, and then proceeded to rip his own party's leadership for passing off the responsibility of passing the appropriations bills to the next congress.  As Voinovich explained it, when the governments various agencies and departments operate under these continuing resolutions, the agencies themselves do not have a budget and have no idea whether they are overspending or underspending.  

As I understand it, the govt's agencies can keep track of their own spending, yes, but the government itself is not setting any limits to the spending or trying to tie spending to revenue, meaning that the government as a whole could be over-spending, which could send it deeper into deficit.  It's a mess.  And Frist is now officially a total political failure.