Both houses of Congress have voted to send the $1.1 trillion “Cromnibus” spending bill to President BarackObama, and the president has promised to sign the measure, though it’s not an easy creature to like. The massive bill represents a last-minute, must-pass caricature of the deliberative process by which Congress is supposed to approve appropriations. It comes studded with special-interest giveaways, including relaxations of Wall Street and campaign finance regulations that would have been unlikely to pass as stand-alone measures. For the District of Columbia, there’s an especially wounding abrogation of a marijuana legalization referendum.
For all that, though, we are inclined to agree with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., one of the monster bill’s principal authors, who has declared it “a monumental achievement for showing how we can work together, we can govern and we can get the job done.”
Well, she probably should have said “modest” instead of “monumental.” Still, in the real world of politics, the question is not “What do you want?” — it’s “What are the alternatives?” And given the alternatives — which were either this bill and the stable government funding through September that it would bring, or a possible government shutdown followed by repeated budgetary cliffhangers — it’s obvious the Cromnibus did, indeed, represent a step in the right direction. Many of those who supported the bill did so in the hope the spirit of compromise, which it so haltingly and messily embodied, might flourish and grow.
Not everyone on Capitol Hill thought that way, to be sure. The measure came under attack from the usual ultras of the Republican right, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who charged it represented a capitulation to Obama’s executive action on immigration. Somewhat less predictable was the mirror-image attack from Democratic left-wing populists, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Mass., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Calif., who opposed the bill because of its provisions on Wall Street and campaign finance.
These performances exemplified the difference between posturing and policymaking. We shared the misgivings over the bill’s changes to Wall Street and campaign finance regulation, but both fell into the category of regrettable, not cataclysmic. The bill would allow greater donations to the major political parties, ostensibly for their national conventions but still subject to disclosure rules. The greater freedom for commercial banks to deal in derivatives was partially offset by greater enforcement budgets for financial regulators. Pelosi reportedly told Democrats in the House, quietly, that they were free to vote for the spending bill if they wished, a sign that she understood these were not issues worthy of a shutdown.
In the end, large bipartisan House and Senate majorities voted yes. Congress’ political showhorses on both the right and the left dominated the headlines, but they were free to preen only because they knew the bill would pass. That, in turn, was thanks to the political workhorses of both parties.