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By MARTIN KADY II
Republicans are howling over what appears to be Nancy Pelosi’s plan to bypass the House Appropriations Committee on the upcoming Iraq war supplemental, complaining that the move will be the beginning of the end of the usual appropriations process and will further consolidate power in the hands of a speaker who already has a lot of it.
Democrats will meet throughout the week to hash out their strategy, and they insist that Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have not yet made any final decisions about how to handle what’s likely to be the last Iraq funding debate of the Bush presidency. But Republican and Democratic appropriations staffers say Pelosi’s office is seriously considering skipping over their committee to take a $178 billion war funding bill — $70 billion more than the president wants — straight to the House floor.
Although it wouldn’t be the first time Pelosi bypassed one of the most powerful Democratic chairmen in her caucus — last year, the speaker circumvented Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) by creating a special global warming subcommittee outside the authority of his committee — sources say Pelosi won’t bypass the Appropriations Committee unless she has the blessing of its chairman, Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.).
Neither Pelosi’s office nor Obey’s would comment on the plan Monday.
Appropriations aides said the top Democratic committee clerks from the Senate and the House spent the weekend in meetings “pre-conferencing” the bill, meaning the senior staff is greasing the process so the legislation can fly through the House and Senate when leaders decide the timing is right.
“Final decisions have not been made,” said Obey spokeswoman Kirstin Brost. “Our job is to produce a bill that meets our responsibilities.”
But Republicans in the House said Pelosi’s plan — if it is her plan — would set a precedent that empowers her to execute a procedural end run on the biggest issues of the day.
Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), a former Appropriations Committee chairman, said that skipping over the Appropriations Committee “puts the whole appropriations process on life support.”
Adds Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), an Appropriations Committee member: “For anyone who cares about the institution, this goes against the democratic process. Someone who is confident of her position would have no problem going through regular order.”
It may be exactly the other way around. After a rocky first year as speaker, Pelosi has notched a series of victories and consolidated her power: She has worked with the White House to get a stimulus bill passed, she has raised the profile of the Olympics issue, and she has fought the president to a standstill on the Colombia free trade pact.
Now she’s turning her attention to the war in Iraq, the issue — more than any other — responsible for her rise to the speaker’s office last January.
“This is not just an internal power play, it is an external national power play,” said Wendy Schiller, a political science professor and congressional expert at Brown University. “Nancy Pelosi is speaker because the Democrats ran a national campaign in 2006 and their key focal point was Iraq. … The Democrats as a party have to show their base they are still trying to get out.”
In crafting a supplemental funding bill for a war she opposes, Pelosi has a thin line to walk. Competing Democratic factions, including the Out of Iraq Caucus and the moderate Blue Dogs, have been meeting with her behind the scenes for two weeks now. House Republicans and the White House — both of whom signed off on bills that combined war spending with domestic needs in the past when Republicans controlled Congress — say they want a “clean” bill this time, one that doesn’t contain the domestic spending many Democrats say is needed to address the nation’s economic woes.
Whatever sort of package Pelosi produces, exposing it to the usual appropriations process also means exposing it to a risk of additions and subtractions that Pelosi doesn’t want.
There have been about three dozen emergency spending bills in the past 20 years, and a handful have passed without input from the Appropriations Committee, including billions in Hurricane Katrina aid and post-Sept. 11 funds.
But none of the Iraq war funding bills have bypassed the Appropriations panel.
Democrats are loath to offer any public criticism of the speaker’s maneuvers because the party needs as much unity as possible on the war in this election year, but some are willing to admit that bypassing the Appropriations Committee is out of the norm.
“It short-circuits the committee process,” said George Behan, chief of staff for Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), a senior appropriator. “It may be the right thing to do, but it is unusual.”
One longtime Democratic aide lamented the loss of the well-worn path of legislative drafting, committee debate and amendment votes that has been part of the legislative process on every other Iraq bill.
“There was a time when you started this in subcommittee, put it through full committee, took things out, added things and gave everyone time to digest it,” the aide said.
Whenever that happens, Republicans are planning to deploy as many procedural protest votes and difficult amendments as possible. In a letter to Obey last week, Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), the top Republican on Appropriations, wrote that “any attempt to bypass the full committee … will be met with unified opposition of committee Republicans. We will not hesitate to exercise every option available under the rules of the House to make our voice heard.”
But in the end, if Democrats remain unified, the GOP is powerless — at least until the supplemental reaches the Senate or the White House, where aides have already said the president will veto any bill that exceeds the $108 billion he has proposed.
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