The mainstream media is rifling through its Roget’s this morning to find new synonyms for “embarrassment” after Senate Democrats failed to pass the $410 billion spending bill last night that would have kept the government funded between now and October.
Politico just goes with it and deems the postponed vote a “major embarrassment,” while the NYT dials it back to mere “embarrassment,” as does the AP. ABC News, getting creative, calls it the “omnibus breakdown.”
Breaking through some of the Beltway static, however, you can see that the bill’s passage next week is a fairly sure thing. The measure includes money to pay GOP congressional staffers’ salaries for this year, as well as home-state earmarks that help sweeten the pot for several GOP senators, including Richard Shelby (AL) — who ranks No. 2 among the bill’s earmark recipients — Susan Collins (ME) — who loves her lighthouse money — and Bob Bennett, who takes his Mormon cricket infestations very seriously.
So if the spending bill’s going to pass eventually, why all the hullabaloo about the delay now? Could the Democrats have handled it better to avoid today’s bad press? The answer is no … and yes.
Since the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal first broke, Republicans have pushed to gain the political upper hand as the capital’s leading earmark critics, despite the fact that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell [R-KY] has plenty of his own projects in the bill. (The House GOP leader, John Boehner, does not request earmarks.)
So knowing that, the best way for congressional Dems to handle the bill was to play up its benefits for the nation and play down the “pork” debate. They were dealt a phenomenally bad hand by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, however, who went on “Face the Nation” last week to brush the spending bill off as “last year’s business” and suggest that the president disapproved of Congress’ free-spending habits.
That’s the D.C. equivalent of going to confession to say that you broke the ninth commandment a few times last year, but it wasn’t a big deal. Worse still, White House budget director Peter Orszag used the identical “last year’s business” framing, which quickly became fodder for Karl Rove and other GOPers to mock Democrats as trivializing the legislative process.
The second blow to the Democrats came when several of their own came out more strongly against the bill than the Republicans. Evan Bayh (IN) trashed the spending measure in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, while forgetting that the bill had 17 of his own earmarks, worth $15 million. Robert Menendez (NJ) dragged his feet over the bill’s small loosening of the Cuban trade embargo.
Why Menendez wasn’t offered a vote to strip the Cuba provisions he objected to — proving that if he could round up the support, he would have his way — is unclear. But in the hyper-partisan environment on the Hill right now, with reporters trailing GOP appropriators’ every step to ask whether they would support the spending bill they helped craft last year, both Congress and the White House would have been well-suited to work together on a unified message. And sadly, that didn’t happen this time.
You could call it everyone’s fault … or no one’s fault, given the bill’s strong chances of becoming law next week.
Late Update: Politico reports that the White House is working out a deal to assuage Menendez’s concerns on the Cuba provisions. But it’s worth noting that Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), just as strong a critic of the Cuba embargo as Menendez, was prepared to vote for the spending bill last night (as his office told me, and I’ll go into at length in another post.)
