By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
It is now up to the Senate.
The United States House has approved on a party-line vote a measure to keep the federal government running for the next seven weeks as budget negotiators try to reach agreement on a new spending plan.
Eastern Kansas Congressman Derek Schmidt, a Republican, says this is a major step toward Congress returning to the normal budget process.
“I’m really encouraged that for the first time in many years it looks like Congress is poised to enact, I’m not quite prepared to say all, but at least several of the annual appropriations bills,” Schmidt tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “We should be doing all, but for some years, they’ve been doing none.”
The federal government currently is living off a continuing resolution reached a year ago. Congress hasn’t approved an actual budget for years.
Schmidt says it appears House budget committee members have agreement on three of the 12 budget bills, with many others close to completion.
The deal has already been met with a rough reception in the Senate, where Republicans will have to have Democratic votes to approve an extension. Senate Republicans brought the House measure up for a vote and it fell well short of the votes needed for passage.
Schmidt says the move by the House is an important step toward returning to the regular budget process.
“So, we’re trying to get back on track with doing these individual bills with lots of eyeballs looking at programs and saying, do we really need to do this and if not, how do we it differently or should we just end it or do we need to do more here? All that sort of thing,” Schmidt says. “That’s what people mean when they say we need to get back to regular order. But, most of us who live in the real world don’t run around the cafes in eastern Kansas talking about regular order. We talk about government being efficient and doing its job. It’s the same thing.”
Schmidt says Congress needs to return to the regular budget process, not rely on continuing resolutions, which are intended to be stopgap measures.
“The one that we are operating under last year just basically kept the government going for an entire year,” Schmidt says. “It’s not optimal. We may end up doing that for some of the agencies, but I don’t want to do it for all of them. I want to get as many of these done in a line-by-line, thoughtful way as we possibly can.”
Schmidt is hopeful Congress will pass all 12 budget bills, but says he would be satisfied if agreement can be reached on at least a majority of them.
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