Senate leaders hope to end showdowns over budget votes

WASHINGTON—The Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders can’t agree on much, but both say they want to dedicate weeks to passing legislation to fund the government next year—and avoid the annual take-it-or-leave-it vote on a $1 trillion-plus catchall spending bill.

For now, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer are saying all the right things to try to revive the older, more deliberative ways of doing Senate business rather than bundling the 12 annual spending bills together.

Critics say it gives too much power to top leaders while rank-and-file lawmakers are shut out of secretive negotiations.

President Donald Trump is playing a role as well, promising that he won’t sign any more such “omnibus” appropriations bills.

“I say to Congress: I will never sign another bill like this again,” Trump said last month after signing the latest catchall spending bill. “I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It’s only hours old. Some people don’t even know what’s in it.”

Schumer and McConnell, along with the top Republican and Democrat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, were meeting Tuesday afternoon to try to chart a way forward.

The meeting comes just weeks after Congress passed a months-late, $1.3 trillion behemoth measure that came after several stops and starts, including a three-day government shutdown in February. That bill followed a separate showdown on setting the overall level of spending for agencies, including the Pentagon, which would otherwise have faced budget cuts.