A Bill Getting Through Congress 'clean' Hasn't Got A Prayer

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Is cleanliness next to Godliness? Not if you look at legislation in Congress. There, cleanliness is next to impossible.

If a bill were to be voted on by both chambers without riders and amendments tacked onto it, then that would be the miracle.

The latest congressional tiff is over the Department of Homeland Security funding authorization bill. Funding runs out at the end of February. And nobody's against homeland security, right?

It depends on your definition of "homeland security" and "against." The Republican leadership in the House passed a bill reauthorizing DHS funding, but also included language that would undo President Barack Obama's executive orders from late last year revising immigration policy. It could be argued that immigration law is at least tangentially related to homeland security, as the Border Patrol is covered by the DHS budget.

The U.S. bishops, for their part, have urged Congress to "supersede" the executive order by passing legislation that strengthens it rather than approving a bill that reverses it.

The House bill, though, has had a tougher go of it in the Senate. Although newly controlled by Republicans, the GOP is now confronted by the same tactic it used when it was in the minority: the threat of a filibuster. Since Senate Republican leaders can't get the 60 votes they'd need to pass the House version as is, they've asked the House to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new bill before DHS funding runs out. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has so far refused to entertain that possibility.

It's far from the first time the lack of a clean bill has stymied Congress, and it likely won't be the last. Go back to the last time the federal minimum wage was increased.

In 2006, the bill was scuttled after repeal of the estate tax was added to the legislation. In 2007, a new attempt on the measure was made. The Democrats, by this time in control of the House, passed a clean minimum-wage bill with no amendments. But it still faced resistance in the Senate. It took the addition of $8.3 billion in tax breaks for small business -- later scaled back to $4.8 billion -- to come up with a version that could win support in both houses. Ultimately, the minimum-wage increase was attached to an Iraq War spending bill.

House rules can impose limits on the number of amendments offered. That's what happened in the "first 100 hours" once the Democrats assumed control of the chamber and passed a number of bills in 2007. But Senate rules have no such restrictions.

"Their moniker is 'the world's greatest deliberative body.' It hasn't been that way since the 1980s," said Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute of Georgetown University in Washington. "Senators have abused their privileges by offering amendments. It's been a very partisan process since the mid-1980s, early1990s," he added. "These times of polarization have really changed the ways senators have used the rules of the Senate to further their goals."

Not that senators have an exclusive franchise on playing politics with legislation. Gregory Koger, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, took note of the immigration-related parts of the DHS bill.

"The Republicans must have felt they had to do something in response to President Obama's immigration decision," Koger said. "If they had done nothing, then the problems they'd have had with their own party base would have been deafening."

Jennifer N. Victor, director of the bachelor's degree program for government and international politics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, a Washington suburb, took note of how the situation has grown more acute.

"The problem in Congress, now more so than ever before, (is) there's been so much stagnation and gridlock in the legislative process that in any given Congress these days, there are very few legislative vehicles that get all the way through this process," Victor said. Any legislator, then, "is often in the game of looking for a thing (bill) they think will pass. 'Which vehicles are moving?' they'll ask. They're talking about bills that are likely to pass."

If it seems like it's getting worse, you're not alone in thinking so. Jason MacDonald, director of graduate programs in the political science department at West Virginia University in Morgantown, has interviewed current and former congressional staffers for a book he's writing on Congress.

"They tell me it was pretty regular practice" in the past to load up bills with all sorts of amendments, MacDonald said. "Everyone knows at the time it was put in the bill -- even the sponsor of the provision -- when it went into the appropriations bill, that that was going to be taken out in the conference committee between the House and the Senate. That (amendment) went in to give the member an opportunity ... to pursue whatever goal he was pursuing in introducing it -- but it was going to come out.

"One staffer who's now a lobbyist told me when she was in the Appropriations Committee, everyone could get past that and get on to more important things like passing the bill," MacDonald continued. But these days, "she used the word 'crazy' to describe the process, he added. "There are things in there that members aren't willing to take out."

Michele Swers, a Georgetown associate professor of government, recalled one delicate dance by Democrats in the Senate five years ago.

"If you look at the way the Affordable Care Act passed, after (Republican) Scott Brown (was elected to the Senate), they were trying to pass the whole thing through (budget) reconciliation," Swers said. "The Senate Democrats allowed the Republicans to introduce and debate amendments, but they weren't going to let them pass, because if even one of them passed, it was going to go to a conference (committee) with the House."

Swers said with the current state of ideological polarization, "I don't know how much worse it can get. Right now the Republican Party controls more seats than necessary to get an equilibrium (in the House). They've pretty much taken the seats that had Democrats in them in districts that voted for (Mitt) Romney for president. If you continue to have situations where you have a divided government," she added, the country will likely experience "situations where you have the maximum of gridlock. You can't agree among branches, or you can't even agree within branches."

Koger agreed. "Power abhors a vacuum. If Congress won't act on a major policy issue like immigration, other actors like the executive branch and the judicial branch are going to start making immigration policy without Congress," he said.

The only hope of change, Georgetown's Huder said, would be a "unified" government, with the same party controlling the White House and both houses of Congress. The Democrats' so-called "filibuster-proof majority" in the Senate lasted only seven months, from July 7, 2009 -- when Al Franken finally assumed office after a razor-thin win in the Minnesota senatorial contest -- and Feb. 4, 2010, when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy.

"The 111th Congress is historic for a whole variety of reasons, and for the number of bills they passed," Huder said. "Since then, not much has gotten done. It's not even a stretch to say the 111th is one of the most productive (Congresses) since the 1960s. But once they (Democrats) lost the House, that all went kaput."