Senate at Impasse on Health Care Reform; Budget Actions Come to Halt

With the House already in danger of a budgetary train wreck later this year, the Senate began to veer off track Monday in its efforts to pass the big-ticket money bills that finance the government.

Unable to extricate themselves from a partisan stalemate over health care reform, Senate Republican leaders failed to end a Democratic filibuster that could lead to action on four major appropriations measures.

Outside analysts predicted that it easily could be weeks before the political impasse is resolved. Until then, the appropriations process in the Senate has ground to a halt.

The budget snags in the two houses are different. The Senate impasse is primarily the product of a partisan fight. Democrats, unable to win a vote on their bill to force health insurers to cover more medical costs, have vowed to try to add the legislation to every large appropriations measure.

The House is facing somewhat deeper difficulties. It has voted to spend far more than Congress’ own budget blueprint permits for a variety of key programs, ranging from defense to transportation. But the chamber does not want to cut elsewhere or to alter current spending limits.

As it stands now, budget experts and knowledgeable lawmakers predicted that there is almost no way to avoid an eleventh-hour standoff on appropriations bills that could threaten to force a reprise of the 1995-96 government shutdown.

“This is probably the most difficult appropriations situation in U.S. history,” said Stanley E. Collender, director of the Federal Budgeting Consulting Group, a nonpartisan budget analysis firm.

Ticking off the items that have resulted in the budget stalemate, he added: “Both houses have narrow majorities, there’s no consensus about what to do with the [budget] surplus and they’re operating under budget rules that were written when we had an out-sized deficit.”

Fueling the budget crisis is that jockeying for political advantage in the 2000 election appears to have begun in earnest, making it even more difficult for serious negotiations between the two parties.

Carol Wait, director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget monitoring group, said that Senate Democrats, with their filibuster Monday, have made it clear that they intend to abandon any quest for bipartisanship in favor of blocking action on the money bills.

Republicans need 60 votes to choke off the filibuster and GOP Senate seats number only 55. The Republicans never gained more than 50 votes on any of the four votes Monday.

At the same time, House Republicans have taken an unusually hard line on the budget. They want to stay within the spending limits established when the budget was in deficit, even though all sides have acknowledged that is apt to prove impossible.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has been pressuring appropriations subcommittee chairmen to revamp some of the money bills, but the measures have been trickling out at a snail’s pace, prompting Hastert to threaten to cut short Congress’ summer recess in August.

The revised budget estimates that President Clinton unveiled Monday--which forecast an extra $1 trillion in budget surpluses over the next 15 years--may ease the problem in the long run but appear unlikely to help avert a budget standoff in September, just before the start of the new federal fiscal year.

As a result, Republicans--and many Democrats--are moving closer to the array of budgetary gimmicks that would enable lawmakers to circumvent the spending limits while still ostensibly leaving them intact.

The two houses already have passed a supplemental appropriations bill that provides about $15 billion in “emergency” spending--much of it for regular defense projects that Republicans wanted to exempt from spending limits.

Some analysts said that Monday’s votes in the Senate could end up serving as a wake-up call, sparking more intense efforts to work out a compromise. Indeed, some believe that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was trying to make just that point by scheduling them.

But the situation in the House appears to be much more difficult to overcome. “I wish I knew the answer,” said Wait of the Committee for a Responsible Budget. “We could very well be headed for a real mess.”