Editorial: Restoring D.C. order
That $1 trillion-plus spending bill that some congressional leaders of both parties and the Obama administration cooked up to finance most of the federal government through September spotlights the decadence into which Congress has sunk. It no longer legislates but simply provides an arena for closed-door deals.
The House and Senate are supposed to pass 12 appropriations bills before the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1. (And, yes, we're in the third month of the 2015 fiscal year.)
They almost never do. This year, not a single appropriations bill was passed. Everything was rolled into a temporary "continuing resolution" in September, and almost all of that again into the leadership's monstrosity incorporating hundreds of spending decisions, including pork-barrel favors, and riders setting various policies.
The Washington Post sent five reporters into the jungle of 1,600 pages. Their report on 47 provisions they considered noteworthy (some routine and some not) took 17 pages in an email printout.
Among the surprises was an expansion by a factor of 10 of the money an individual may give to political party committees (to $324,000 a year), permission for multi-employer pension plans to cut payments to retirees, and nullification of a provision in the Dodd-Frank law requiring banks to trade some derivative securities through uninsured subsidiaries.
Good? Bad? Make no difference? Who knows? Did you read anything about hearings or debates on those proposals? Neither did we.
Republican leaders have pledged to use "regular order" - obeying the rules - when they take full control of Congress in January. The deadline-threatened, party-scrambled narrow House vote approving the measure Thursday night was a display of rampant disorder.
Reform will take guts. We'll believe it when we see it.
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