From Politico, December 22:
No tangible progress toward funding the government was made before lawmakers left for the holidays.
Congress has adjourned for the holidays having made no tangible progress toward funding the government ahead of a shutdown looming less than six weeks away.
The most conspicuous sign that Congress faces real obstacles before the Jan. 30 funding deadline came late Thursday, when Senate leaders gave up on passing a spending package and sent members home for two weeks, despite working for more than a month to appease senators who had objections.
But the impediments to reaching a deal that can pass both chambers are more extensive, starting with the fact that Republicans and Democrats on both ends of the Capitol have yet to start negotiating the details of the nine pending funding bills. The lack of bipartisan offer-trading is raising the likelihood of another short-term punt — or another shutdown.
“We wasted a lot of time because the Senate’s not negotiating yet,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in an interview last week. “When they’re ready to negotiate, we can move fast.”
Cole and his counterpart, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine), just reached an agreement over the weekend on overall totals for the remaining spending bills Congress needs to pass. Lawmakers already passed three as part of the package that ended the shutdown last month — funding veterans and agriculture agencies, federal food aid and the Food and Drug Administration, along with Congress itself, through Sept. 30.
For more than a month Cole and Collins had been trying to bridge differences on key numbers while Senate leaders tried to advance a funding package that reflects consensus from only their side of the Capitol. Last week’s heave failed, but senators expect to try again in early January.
“We have different dynamics in our caucuses that we need to deal with,” Collins said this month as she left a meeting with Cole.
Democrats have been growing impatient. “They wasted all that time during the summer,” said Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, about House Republicans spending the better part of this year crafting partisan funding bills.
Then Democrats had to wait for their GOP counterparts to strike the “majority to majority” deal on funding totals that finally arrived Saturday.
“Democrats are prepared. We’re ready to move. Let’s go,” DeLauro said.
Even if top appropriators can manage to agree on the nine remaining funding bills, other thorny dynamics threaten to complicate final passage in each chamber. The pitfalls include the mismatch between what appropriators want to spend and the demands of House fiscal hawks seeking flat funding for agencies — as well as the fact that Democrats will need to help pass any spending bills in the Senate, as they acutely illustrated with this fall’s record 43-day shutdown.
The totals top Republican appropriators just agreed upon are not public. But Cole said the deal will ensure overall funding would be below the level laid out in the stopgap funding patch enacted last month....
....MUCH MORE
and a poem about same
http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/pn/modules/Downloads/docs/An_Unusual_State_of_Matter.pdf