Congress gets back to business
Bill funding foreign aid, several departments passes in House
WASHINGTON — Even as lawmakers stumble in their quest to pass another coronavirus response measure, both the House and the Senate sought to return to some semblance of normal business this week, passing annual must-do measures on spending and defense policy despite the challenges of legislating during a pandemic.
On Friday, the House passed a $259 billion funding bill for foreign aid and the interior, agriculture, and veterans affairs departments along party lines. The measure is the first annual spending measure to pass either the House or Senate this year, but it has scant chance of becoming law, serving instead as a springboard for negotiations down the line.
The annual process of appropriating federal spending has been eclipsed this year by coronavirus relief efforts. But funding the government remains the biggest must-do item for lawmakers on a legislative agenda that has been trimmed back to the essentials because of the virus.
Friday’s spending legislation is studded with $38 billion in emergency funding that violates the spirit of last year’s nearly forgotten budget and debt accord, along with other provisions that are controversial with Republicans, but many of its nuts-and-bolts elements were generated in the Appropriations Committee’s tradition of bipartisan collaboration.
Action on the measure followed passage by both the House and the Senate this week on the annual defense bill, which has been passed every year since the Kennedy era.
On the defense measure, both the Democratic-controlled House and the Gop-held Senate defied a veto threat from President Donald Trump to pass a defense bill with Democratic-drafted language to remove the names of Confederate officers from American military bases such as Fort Bragg and Fort Benning.
Both House and Senate measures call for $741 billion for the military.
The White House said in a statement this week that it supports the overall spending figure but says it “strongly objects” to the edict to force the military to strip bases of their Confederate names.
Either way, the real action on Capitol Hill involves the upcoming effort to pass a fifth bipartisan COVID-19 relief bill, which is stuck in the Senate.
As a result, Congress is likely to return to Washington in September to handle a stopgap funding bill that would last until December to prevent a campaign-season government shutdown.