HR 2608 Easily Passes in House

At this point it is almost old news, but yesterday the House passed HR 2608, the [second] Continuing Appropriations Act, 2012, by a very bipartisan vote. Large numbers of both Republicans and Democrats voted for the proposed six-week extension of spending authority. The opposition was also very bipartisan with most of the 66 opposition votes coming from Republicans.

The Fix Was In

Last week’s deal was apparently very solid. Not only was the vote not close, but there was little discussion. The deal had allowed for an hour’s worth of debate on the floor, but the whole action yesterday took less than an hour. Actually it was closer to 30 minutes than an hour and that time included a roll call vote.

I haven’t heard this mentioned by any of the network pundits, but this is how Congress is supposed to work. For the peoples work to get done the different sides of the debate need to be able to work out compromises that are marginally acceptable to both sides. This is particularly true when there is a mixed majority, the House controlled by one party and the Senate by the other. Hopefully we will see more of this ability to compromise on important legislation.

Dangers of Unanimous Consent

In yesterday’s blog I made a point about the dangers associated with considering this bill (and any bill) under a unanimous consent agreement. When I had initially written that post, I hadn’t seen Monday’s Congressional Record, so I hadn’t realized that the unanimous consent motion had been offered on Monday afternoon.

It’s obvious in hind sight that the Republican leadership in the House recognized the potential of a single representative de-railing the consideration of this bill. That is why the unanimous consent motion was offered before 5:00 pm on Monday. If a voice was raised in opposition they still had the Rules Committee hearing scheduled for the formation of a rule for the consideration of the bill on Tuesday.

The Next Six Weeks

It will be interesting to see if this new found ability to compromise will extend to the spending bills that will need to pass in the next six weeks. I doubt that we will see votes of this large a margin on most of the bills, but maybe we will get enough ability to compromise to at least get bills that can pass in both Houses.

The interesting thing for readers of this blog to watch for is how the Congress will deal with a new Homeland Security spending bill. The House could introduce a new bill using either the original Committee language or the version passed in the House. The latter could possibly avoid the extended floor debate that accompanied the first bill.

The other alternative would be for the Senate to add their DHS language that was developed for HR 2017 and add that to another House passed spending bill, probably the DOD spending bill. This would probably be the least time consuming as it would not require the initial passage process, even if abbreviated, in the House. This is the process that I am expecting to see.