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Politico...
Democrats embraced
policy riders in past
By Jonathan Allen
4/7/11
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Barack Obama
hate policy riders. They have no place in spending bills, the top
Democrats have said during the latest budget debate.
Unless, of course, they’re Democratic policy riders.
“We’re happy to debate these, but on a legislative vehicle, not a
spending vehicle,” Reid said Thursday.
Republicans say that’s a different tune than he was singing in 2009,
when he, President Barack Obama and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi loaded
such riders onto a government-funding bill similar to the one now being
negotiated. A senior Democratic aide said the two aren’t comparable,
and Republican Speaker John Boehner, who is now trying to preserve
riders, has blasted them in the past, too.
Among the legislative items Democrats attached to that spending measure
were:
* A long-desired abortion-rights provision making birth-control pills
and devices cheaper for Planned Parenthood and other family-planning
clinics who provide them to students on college campuses and poor
women. Originally, an effort had been made to include that rider on an
emergency supplemental spending bill to fund the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan and was removed amid political pressure.
* The repeal of a school-voucher program in the District of Columbia
that is close to the heart of the current speaker, John Boehner.
* A relaxation of restrictions on travel to Cuba.
* Reid’s pet project: Delaying the development of Yucca Mountain as a
nuclear waste storage site through spending cuts and legislative
language; and
* A provision designed to facilitate the implementation of
taxpayer-funded health benefits for the same-sex partners of federal
employees.
“Policy restrictions are a routine part of spending bills. Senate
Democratic Leaders – and President Obama – have supported hundreds, if
not thousands of them, including on CRs,” Michael Steel, a spokesman
for Boehner, said in reference to a “continuing resolution” — the
vehicle political leaders are using as they try to negotiate a deal to
keep the government running through the end of September.
But Democrats insist that not all riders are created equal.
“There is a difference between including riders on a bill when they are
supported by a majority of the Senate and just need a vehicle and
including riders on a bill because a minority is trying to ram through
something that would not have support on its own,” the senior
Democratic aide countered. “Here, keeping the government funded should
be enough.”
In 2008, Boehner objected to non-military provisions in a
Democratic-written bill providing war funding.
“Knowing the troop-funding bill is popular and certain to pass,
politicians in Congress tried to attach tax increases and unrelated
spending increases to it - in effect, exploiting our troops by forcing
them to carry unpopular political provisions they knew could not pass
Congress on their own,” Boehner said at the time, according to States
News Service. “Attaching these ‘riders’ is the sort of stunt that has
made Americans extremely cynical about Washington. That anti-war forces
in the U.S. House would employ this scheme right before Memorial Day
was irresponsible at best and depraved at worst.”
While Republicans are a minority in the Senate, they hold power in the
House. It’s not clear which riders would have majority support in the
Senate because there has been no opportunity for the upper chamber to
vote on them.
The overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats have voted for spending
bills carrying a ban on subsidizing abortion in the District of
Columbia that is also now included in a stopgap bill the House passed
on Thursday. Forty-nine current Democratic senators have voted for
spending bills with that provision in them. The language didn’t prevent
Obama from voting for appropriations when he was in the Senate, nor did
it stop him from signing at least one bill into law.
David Nather contributed to this report.
Read it at Politico
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