Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said Sunday that the House and Senate should go to conference with the government spending bill bouncing between the two chambers.
“Why don’t we have a conference committee on this?” Paul said on CBS’s Face the Nation. ‘We could appoint one today and have one tomorrow to hash out the difference.”
Rather than go to conference, the chambers have been sending amended spending bills back and forth over the last week. The House passed a bill that defunded Obamacare; the Senate stripped the defund language and sent a clean bill back to the House. The House then passed Saturday a bill that would delay Obamacare for a year; Senate leaders have already said that it is dead on arrival in the Senate.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) said that the Senate has wanted to take a spending bill to conference for months, but hasn’t been able to get House Republicans to agree to it.
“We’ve been trying for more than six months to get Republicans to approve a conference committee on the budget,” Durbin said on the program.
The federal government will shut down Tuesday unless Congress agrees to a new spending bill.
