Deal Reached in Senate on Massive $1.7 Trillion Omnibus Spending Bill

Readers know how I feel about this abomination. They also know that this was practically a fait accompli days ago, despite last-minute attempts to stop it. Politico reported less than an hour ago that Senate leadership has reached a deal that will allow maximum posturing as well as maximum spending for the next nine-plus months:

The Senate clinched a deal Thursday morning that tees up passage of a $1.7 trillion government funding package in the coming hours, averting a shutdown that would have kicked in Friday at midnight.

The agreement to vote on the mammoth spending bill is a sharp turn from Wednesday night, when senators left the Capitol mired in gridlock over how to handle a politically tricky GOP border amendment. If approved, that proposed Republican-backed change could derail the entire package because it would spark a revolt from House progressives.

In the end, senators sought to resolve the impasse by adding two dueling border proposals to the list of 15 spending bill amendments that are set to get voted on Thursday. Both border plans are expected to fail, though the votes will give Democrats and Republicans a chance to stake out their positions on the issue without jeopardizing the fate of the broader funding measure, which would boost federal agency budgets through the fiscal year.

“We have an agreement now … It’s taken a while but it is worth it, and I appreciate the cooperation of everyone here,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said announcing the deal from the floor.

As Jazz pointed out earlier, the vote on the omnibus looked more fraught as the day began. In the wee hours of the morning, Chuck Schumer had gone to the Senate floor to announce that a deal was coming closer, and that both sides were strategizing around the demand to hold a vote to keep Title 42 restrictions in place for asylum seekers. Mike Lee had demanded an up-or-down vote on that amendment and predicted it would win, which is precisely what Schumer feared.

Schumer didn’t seem too worried about it at the time, though:

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer took to the floor at 2 a.m. Thursday to say an agreement was near to speed up passage of the massive fiscal 2023 omnibus spending bill, after senators spent the day Wednesday wrangling behind the scenes. …

“It is my expectation we will be able to lock in an agreement on the omnibus tomorrow morning,” Schumer said. “We are very close, but we’re not there yet. ”

The New York Democrat said the chamber would reconvene at 8 a.m., for a nomination vote, which he said would “bring everybody here to get final agreement and then to move forward.”

The stunt of parallel amendments is rather clever in its benefits to both sides. It gives Senate Democrats a way to claim they voted for border security while denying Lee the necessary 60 votes on Title 42. With that poison pill out of the way, Nancy Pelosi can rally her lame-duck majority to pass an omnibus that no one has had time to read in detail.

She “hopes” to do that by this evening, so no one can really find out what’s in it until it passes:

NEW — PELOSI says her “hope” would be to pass the omnibus tonight.

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) December 22, 2022

I’m not going to rehash all of the ways in which this betrays the values of self-governance and transparency. My rant yesterday covered those points, and nothing that has happened since has changed my argument. If anything, this cheap stunt on amendments to a budget bill to derail an important policy debate and decision makes those points even more acute. A government shutdown would have been a small price to pay to incentivize Congress to get back to proper and responsible governance, especially in returning to an open and transparent process on budgeting through regular order rather than omnibus bills written by two retirees in the figurative darkness and shoved down the throats of 533 other elected representatives and senators.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a political party that supports those values. That much has been made clear in this swampy, corrupt process that shouldn’t have occurred once, let alone turn into a new normal over the last decade or more.

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