Over the past decade, comity between the two parties has deteriorated rapidly. The specter of the “nuclear” option looms over the United States Senate, and an impending ethics battle threatens to envelop the House. Some have even claimed that bipartisanship in Washington is dead. However, as the AP’s Jim Abrams reports today, Democrats and Republicans have finally found at least one thing they can agree on: pork.
In a rare breach with their president, Senate Republicans joined Democrats in rejecting Wednesday a spending ceiling set by the White House for a six-year highway and mass transit funding bill.
The Senate voted 76-22 to defeat an attempt to rule that the $295 billion bill added to the federal deficit and thus violated budget rules.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., who initiated the budgetary point of order against the bill, said it was “quite simply, unequivocally, unquestionably, a budget buster” and it “seems a little bit inappropriate” to ignore the spending limits set by the president.
These are exciting times to be a deficit dove in Congress. Not only has the Senate bucked the White House on the Transportation bill (Bush has threatened to veto anything above $284 billion), but the House also recently sent legislation to the Senate that would increase the “debt limit by $781 billion to nearly $9 trillion.” With some hard work and a little elbow grease, Republicans and Democrats can surely come together — in a bipartisan way — to hit the impressive $10 trillion mark. Then what will the nattering nabobs of negativism say about the decline of inter-party relations on the hill?
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