Tuesday, December 18, 2007: In two separate votes, Senate approves an omnibus spending package that includes supplemental war funds

[:09]
Trent Lott has just officially resigned from the U.S. Senate, a letter being read by the Senate’s presiding officer.

With that, the Senate is done for the night. Back at you at 11:30 tomorrow.

[23:45]
The Senate is in a quorum call. It’s a late one tonight.

[23:22]
Mike Enzi (WY) who just voted against the omnibus spending bill calls it an “ominous omnibus.”

He says that it is an appropriations bill that contains legislation, a muddying of Senate procedure in violation of Senate rules. We are supposed to mark up legislation in committee, he says.

The omnibus funds every government agency except for the Department of Defense, for which an appropriations FY 2008 bill is already law.

[22:41]
Here come the votes. The omnibus will pass. Nay votes include: DeMint, Enzi, McCaskill, Crapo, Coburn, Leahy, Isakson, Chambliss, Bayh, Ensign, Hagel, Burr, Voinovich, Barrasso, Allard, and Feingold.

The omnibus spending package FY 2008 (minus war funding, see below) passes 76-17 with one senator responding “present.”

[22:35]
The Senate is now voting on the FY 2008 Omnibus spending bill. It bears mention, though, that the Senate is voting on a version of the bill that does not contain an amendment securing $70b in supplementary war funding, which the Senate passed earlier tonight. Senate leadership clipped that amendment from the bill and sent it to the House so that the House could approve it. The House approved the omnibus spending package last night, but didn’t include supplementary war funding in their version of the mammoth federal spending package.

Presumably, the main portion of the bill and the supplementary war funding amendment will meet again for the first time in conference. Is this even constitutional?

The only way this maneuvering could fail is if senators vote down the omnibus spending bill (minus war funds) which they won’t. The House will pass the war funding easily.

DeMint (SC) railed on the omnibus bill as being full of pork (9,000 earmarks) and said that senators hadn’t had a chance to read it. It took six hours to print out, he said. Something like 1,400 pages?

[22:23]
Durbin comes back at DeMint’s accusation that Democrats are trying to sneak a huge bill containing mysterious provisions past the Senate.

“Have you read the bill? Have you read the bill?” interrupts DeMint.

Durbin asks for regular order.

Durbin says that DeMint had 46 hours and 8 minutes to read the bill online.

“Welcome to the world of the internet,” says Durbin. “Welcome to a Senate where we pass spending bills.”


[22:12]
There are a couple of upcoming votes yet tonight in the Senate.

I must admit confusion as to the war supplemental funding passed earlier tonight in the Senate. I was under the impression that the funding was passed as an amendment to the FY 2008 Omnibus spending bill.

According to Jim DeMint (SC), who is speaking now on the floor, the war supplemental funding ($70b for Iraq and Afghanistan) is separate from the omnibus spending bill.

DeMint is railing on the omnibus spending bill. He says it took six hours to print out and senators have no idea what’s in it. He says it’s got 9,000 earmarks in it. It contains “a number of ridiculous provisions that we’re just finding.”

DeMint exhorts his colleagues, “A vote against this spending bill is not a vote against the troops.”

So I’m figuring he knows something I don’t.

As DeMint began to speak, Richard Durbin (IL) asked if he could interrupt to poise a question and DeMint answered, “No, sir, I’d like to make my statement.”

He is not listing provisions he does not support. $10m for lawyers for illegal immigrants, for example.

I guess what DeMint was saying is that the war funding portion of the bill has, for the moment, been split from the omnibus spending and sent back to the House for approval. The Senate now votes on the package minus war funding while the House votes on war funding.

Thus the unusual result of a bifurcated bill that neither House will have voted on en toto.

[22:05]
Senators Johnny Isakson (GA) and Saxby Chambliss (GA) are talking on the floor about a provision in the just-passed omnibus spending bill that some senator slipped in late in the process. The Georgia senators are aggrieved because, as they explain it, the section (Division C, §134?) limits how states (or the Army Corps of Engineers?) are able to govern water management. Something like that. I know that the Georgia senators were active on the floor this fall when Georgia was facing water shortages, especially in and around Atlanta.

They noted that the provision was slipped in and fellow senators had no idea. They seem to be urging that the provision would be scrapped during upcoming conference on the bill.

[20:58]
The Senate is now turning to the matter of fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). First it will vote on a version of the the AMT fix that is paid for. Max Baucus (MT) finance committee chairman admitted that he doesn't think that there are 60 votes to move the paid-for AMT fix past a procedural vote.

As I understand this paid-for version of the AMT, it contains provisions that will close up offshore tax haven loopholes in order to cover the loss of revenue resulting from the AMT patch.

Grassley is calling this vote "Groundhog Day," saying that the Senate has already rejected the idea of paid-for AMT. He notes that the Senate passed a version of the AMT fix that is not offset. So, he wonders, why are we voting on another version of the AMT fix that contains tax-raising offsets.

It should be said that offsets in the first version of the AMT fix went after money resulting from private equity profits. As I understand, this new version of the AMT fix goes after money that is sent offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.

[20:57]
The Senate voted earlier this hour to add $70b in supplementary war funding (Iraq and Afghanistan) to the Omnibus FY 2008 federal spending bill. The war spending supplement passed 70-25.

[20:47]
The Senate is now voting on a McConnell amendment to the omnibus federal spending bill. The amendment adds $70b to the bill for supplementary Iraq & Afghanistan funding. It needs 51 ayes to pass. Bush has threatened to veto the spending bill if the supplementary funding is not included, as it was not included in the House-passed version of the bill.

The amendment passed 70-25.

[13:11]
Work in the Senate this afternoon will focus on the omnibus spending package that the House passed yesterday. The House version of the appropriations package covers 14 executive agencies and includes supplementary funds for the war in Afghanistan. However, as it stands now it does not include supplemental Iraq funding. President Bush expects the Senate to add $40b or so as an Iraq supplemental. If the Senate does not add this money, Bush will likely veto the bill. The questions remains as to whether the House would pass an amended version of the bill that the Senate would be sending back to them.

[13:10]
The Senate has recessed for party meetings. It will return at 14:15. Lott spoke just before the recess, drawing applause from the chamber as he spoke on the Senate floor for perhaps the last time.

[10:46]
Last night, Senate majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) pulled a bill reworking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) from the floor of the Senate. This was a surprising move. Earlier yesterday, a version of the bill containing retroactive immunity for telecomm companies complicit in illegal government spying passed a motion to proceed vote by 76-10.

It was then up to senators Russ Feingold (WI) and Chris Dodd (CT) to convince 58 other senators to add an amendment to the bill scrapping immunity. This would have been highly unlikely. But Dodd and Feingold argued against the immunity provision yesterday on the floor.

When Reid pulled the bill from the floor, Dodd cited a victory. It seems that Reid, for whatever reason, did not want to proceed with a bill containing the grant of immunity. Rather than have the Feingold/Dodd amendment lose in a roll call vote, Reid instead decided it was best not to have the vote at all.

So, with the FISA bill on the backburner for now, the Senate has spent the morning paying tribute to one-time majority leader Trent Lott (MS), who has announced that he will resign his Senate seat before the end of the year.