A Sure-Thing Budget Deal Still Isn’t

It looked like a slam dunk. A week ago President Bush, flanked by a bipartisan phalanx of congressional power brokers, announced he had reached a deal on the federal budget. All that was left, it seemed, was the shouting.

But getting the final House and Senate votes on the budget resolution has proved harder than expected, thanks to a variety of last-minute squabbles, procedural hurdles and human error.

The resolution, which sets broad tax-cut and spending targets, has yet to pass after a week in which two pages of the bill got lost in a copying machine. The House stayed in session until 2:30 a.m. Friday waiting for a vote that never happened. Word surfaced Monday that the Senate parliamentarian’s rulings on the budget debate cost him his job. And Tuesday, the House went through all manner of obtuse shenanigans to get the beleaguered measure back on track.

GOP leaders said they believe they now have enough votes to push the budget through the House and Senate by week’s end. But the gyrations leading up to those votes is a pointed reminder of just how difficult it is to get things done in the narrowly divided Congress.

“Everybody’s shaking their head,” Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) said. “It doesn’t inspire confidence in the legislative process. It raises questions at a key moment in time.”

Every budget negotiation ends in a flurry of eleventh-hour posturing and cliffhangers, but this, congressional veterans agree, is worse--and more bizarre--than ever.

“It’s a tough process, as hard as it’s ever been,” said a fatigued Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.

The good news for Bush: Congress remains likely to approve a resolution that includes much of what he wants. The bad news: That’s the easy part. Congress then has to draft the bills that carry out the details of tax and spending policy--and in those details, as the saying goes, lies the devil.

“There are huge skirmishes to come,” Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) said.

One consequence of the budget resolution’s rocky progress: While GOP leaders had once hoped to deliver tax cut legislation to Bush by Memorial Day, analysts say they now would be lucky to get it done by July 4.

On Tuesday, White House and GOP officials appeared to resolve a dispute over tax cut provisions that risked losing support from a handful of centrist Democrats who are crucial to passing the budget. But even with that apparently settled, some swing Democrats complained that the budget shortchanged education programs.

Such complaints are just the latest snag that developed after Bush’s announcement last Wednesday that he had struck a deal on the budget resolution. With him were key conservative Democrats, including Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), the deal-maker whose presence seemed to signal the accord was a fait accompli.

But then turf wars broke out among House committee leaders over their latitude in implementing the budget. Conservative Republicans, meanwhile, tried to rein in their party’s own spending.

Republican leaders had hoped to ram the budget through the House on Thursday night. Lawmakers waited hours for the bill to be filed and brought to the floor. Finally, about 2 a.m. Friday, GOP leaders sheepishly announced they could not consider the budget because two pages had been lost while the bill was being photocopied.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), an opponent of the budget agreement, declared it “the day in which incompetence came to the rescue of democracy.”