Stopgap Spending Bill Passes

WASHINGTON -- Ordinarily it takes 269 legislators, more than half the members of the House and Senate, to pass a law. But eight lawmakers managed Wednesday to send the president a bill to keep most of the government operating Dec. 4-8.

By consent of the lawmakers present, the five House members and three senators did not enforce rules requiring quorums of at least half of each chamber’s members before business can be transacted.

The legislation became necessary when Congress, meeting last week in a lame-duck session, failed to enact a $388-billion spending bill providing funds for 13 Cabinet departments -- all but Defense and Homeland Security -- and a host of independent agencies for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. During its regular session, Congress had completed only four of its 13 regular spending bills.

Democrats objected that the spending bill included a provision that would have given the chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees or their aides authority to see individual tax returns.

Republicans said they had only intended the provision to authorize congressional investigators to have access to IRS offices, not to individual tax returns. They promised to correct what they called a drafting error.

House Democrats still refused to vote on deleting the provision, complaining that the bill’s Republican drafters had not given them enough time to digest its 3,646 pages and $388-billion worth of spending. They agreed to return Dec. 6 to Washington for a vote.

But the stop-gap spending authority that Congress had approved is good only through Dec. 3. On Wednesday, Congress extended that to Dec. 8.

Of the five House members present to vote, three were Democrats and two Republicans. Three were from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs of Washington, but also voting was Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento). Of the three senators, present the only Democrat was Harry Reid of Nevada.