Will a Zombie Congress Devour Our Gains?

Congress will be returning to session next week after Labor Day with a busy agenda that nobody actually wants to deal with because this year’s elections seem so crazy.

At the top of mind of small-government conservatives (and obviously libertarians) is the intense pressure to pass a spending bill to keep the government in operation. The omnibus spending bill approved last December funds the government to the end of September. So they’ve got to pass something.

Several activist groups that support reducing the size of government and lowering taxes are putting forward an organized effort to try to discourage Congress from kicking the can down the road to December’s lame duck session and then pushing through a last-minute, post-election, must-pass spending bill influenced by members of Congress who are on their way out the door and don’t have to worry about accountability. (We’re looking at you, Sen. Harry Reid.)

Some of the groups involved—like Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and Americans for Task Reform—are heavy-hitters in the small government and Tea Party activism. They, and several dozen other organizations, are calling on Congress to avoid a last-minute push to fund government all the way through 2017 and quietly include all sorts of cronyist regulations that benefit certain influential parties that lobby the government. In a teleconference with the media this morning, participants noted efforts to re-establish the loan authority of the cronyist Export-Import Bank as a concern. In a letter, the groups note how last year’s last-minute, must-pass omnibus spending bill turned out:

Congress already considered the matter of expiring tax provisions a little under a year ago. The $680 billion package signed into law last December made some of these items permanent and allowed more than two dozen others to expire at the end of 2015, laying the groundwork for comprehensive tax reform. Included in the nearly $20 billion in tax provisions that are set to expire are provisions pertaining to small-scale wind power, geothermal heat pumps, race horses, film production—provisions that distort our tax laws and narrowly benefit favored industries over the rest of the tax base. These provisions were made temporary for a reason. It makes no sense to come back just one year later and selectively extend certain provisions in a lame duck.

Reason noted some of the secret stuff buried in that Omnibus legislation earlier in our April issue (not all of it was bad—but it was certainly not transparent). In a press call this morning, representatives from three of the groups involved in this push said they’re specifically focused on making sure spending legislation is not approved at the last minute, and only spending and tax-related legislation. They’re going to stay focused on that goal and not other types of bills that could get pushed through in December. That may matter in the event that heavily negotiated criminal justice and sentencing reforms finally make it through Congress before the end of the year.

But clearly something does need to be passed in order to prevent a government shutdown. What some Republicans are pushing for is a continuing resolution to fund the government through March of next year. That would put the new president and a new Congress into place. Read more about the push behind that six-month plan here.