The Senate Appropriations Committee did on Thursday what no one thought it could do by passing fiscal year 2019 appropriations bills for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Defense, thereby completing the Senate’s regular appropriations process sooner than any year since 1988.
“We’re trying to make this more adult behavior,” Shelby, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, told Yellowhammer News in an interview on Thursday.
In recent years, the appropriations process has been ravaged by the committee’s failure to meet its regular order obligations which requires that regular appropriations bills, funding things like defense and the EPA, be enacted by the fiscal year’s beginning on October 1.
That failure, exacerbated by pushes to insert partisan “poison pills” into spending bills, has repeatedly resulted in continuing resolutions and omnibus spending bills, such as the one passed in March, six months late.
“We’re trying to keep poison pills – you know, legislation and things that will blow up the appropriations process – off,” Shelby said, which is tough to do.
“I’ve put poison pills in appropriations bills, we all have that have been up here a while. To make a statement, to make a stand. What we’re trying to do is stay on point, to stay on appropriations,” he said.
Since Shelby became committee chairman in April, he has been working closely with his Democrat counterpart, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, to return the appropriations process to regular order.
“We’ve tried to say that what’s more important is not getting ahead as a Republican or getting ahead as a Democrat,” Shelby said.
Staying that course requires good, old-fashioned cordiality.
“Tone is important in the process,” Shelby said. “That is, reaching out to each other, and we know each other. There’s just a hundred of us.”
“A lot of us are friends,” he said. “We have our ideological differences, but we get along personally.”
The House and Senate will soon hold a conference committee meeting to reconcile differences in their appropriations bills for Energy and Water Development, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and the Legislative Branch.
At this pace, Congress is set to fund the government by the new fiscal year’s beginning, but Shelby says don’t hold your breath.
“Keep your fingers crossed and let’s see how we do from now ‘til the fall,” he said.
@jeremywbeaman is a contributing writer for Yellowhammer News
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