Homestead mailing list

["Wendy" <crazygardens AT nationi.net>]

Spending Bill Held Up by Tax Provision
Measure Lets Panels Examine Returns; Repeal Is Planned

By Dan Morgan and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 23, 2004; Page A01

A $388 billion government-wide spending bill, passed by Congress on 
Saturday, was stranded on Capitol Hill yesterday, its trip to the White 
House on hold as embarrassed Republicans prepared to repeal a provision that 
could give the Appropriations committees the right to examine the tax 
returns of Americans.

Top GOP lawmakers disavowed the provision, expressed surprise that it was in 
the bill, and blamed both the Internal Revenue Service and congressional 
staffs for incorporating it into the omnibus spending package funding 
domestic departments in 2005.

But Democrats -- and some Republicans -- charged that the incident 
highlighted the deterioration of a budget-writing system that is prey to 
such incidents. Unable to agree on how much to spend on basic governmental 
services, they say, House and Senate GOP leaders increasingly are resorting 
to a secretive process that leaves the public and most members of Congress 
ignorant of the content of huge spending bills until hours before a final 
vote.

At a news conference denouncing this closed-door process, Sen. Kent Conrad 
(N.D.), ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, warned that "something 
really seriously bad is going to happen if we let this continue." He quoted 
a Republican, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.): "This process is broken."

Republicans hope to finally quell the uproar over the provision tomorrow, 
when the House is set to approve a resolution repealing it. The Senate took 
that action on Saturday, after Senate leaders promised that the omnibus 
spending bill on which the provision was riding would not be sent to the 
president for his signature until both houses had repealed it.

The provision, added to the spending package of more than 3,000 pages last 
Thursday, would give staffers of the House and Senate Appropriations 
committees similar powers to enter IRS facilities and examine tax returns as 
are now available to the tax-writing committees of the two chambers.

But the provision appeared to some lawmakers to expressly set aside privacy 
safeguards, which mandate criminal penalties for those divulging individual 
tax information. Members of both parties charged this could breach the 
confidentiality of returns.

House officials said the language was intended only to allow staffers to 
enter IRS facilities where returns were being processed, to oversee how 
taxpayer money was being used. Such full access is now denied by the IRS, 
they said, because of the chance a congressional aide might inadvertently 
see a return.

The provision, House sources said, was drafted by the IRS and inserted into 
the bill by lower-level House staffers. Senior House and Senate Republicans 
said they never saw it until the bill appeared on the floor, and yesterday 
IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said the IRS commissioner "was unaware of the 
provision until after it was already approved" and "strongly supports it 
being deleted from the final bill."

On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) referred to the 
provision as the "Istook amendment," and congressional aides said it had 
been inserted at the request of Rep. Ernest J. Istook Jr. (R-Okla.), who 
chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS.

But yesterday Istook said in a written statement that he had been left in 
the dark about the provision: "I didn't write it; I didn't approve it; I 
wasn't even consulted. My name shouldn't be associated with it because I had 
nothing to do with it."

Micah Leydorf, Istook's spokeswoman, said she understood the language was 
added by the full Appropriations Committee staff or by Istook's subcommittee 
staff at the direction of staffers for the full committee.

"We have a problem with how bills like this are put together," Istook 
acknowledged. "The subcommittee chairman should never be bypassed like I was 
in this case."

He added that "honest mistakes were made but there's no conspiracy."

But some top Republicans were less charitable. Speaking on the Senate floor 
Saturday, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the tax-writing 
Finance Committee, called the provision an "outrage" and said it will "bring 
us back to the doorsteps of the days of Nixon, Truman and similar dark 
periods in our tax history when tax return information was used as a club 
against political enemies."

"It's simply representative of the way Congress is now operating," said 
Allen Schick, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. 
"It shows on the one hand how easy it is to put something in [an omnibus 
bill] without anybody else knowing about it." Although this may look 
particularly egregious, he said, the giant bill also contains hundreds of 
other provisions that could not be enacted into law if they were offered as 
single bills requiring full debate and scrutiny in both houses.

Such huge bills, lawmakers acknowledge, represent a breakdown of the normal 
budget process. For the second time in three years, House and Senate 
Republicans, bitterly divided over the level of domestic spending, failed to 
agree on a budget blueprint, as required by law.

The impasse forced delays in drafting many of the spending bills, and when 
Congress returned last week from its election recess, it had yet to complete 
nine of the 13 annual appropriations bills. Seven of the spending bills had 
never been to the Senate floor for debate, one had never been to the House 
floor, and one funding the nation's nuclear weapons programs and Army Corps 
of Engineers water projects was still in a Senate subcommittee.

To overcome this problem, GOP leaders crammed all the remaining legislation 
into a single omnibus package that, under congressional rules, could not be 
amended.

It contained all the unfinished spending bills, along with three other 
pieces of major legislation -- the Satellite Home Viewer Extension and 
Reauthorization Act, the Snake River Water Rights Act, and the Federal Lands 
Recreation Enhancement Act.

Along with those measures, lawmakers and staffs added thousands of local 
projects benefiting home states and districts. Also included in the final 
bill was a major provision barring states from enforcing laws that require 
health care providers, hospitals, HMOs or insurers to pay for, provide or 
give referrals for abortion.

But when the measure was rushed to the floors of the two chambers Saturday, 
few members had read it. Lawmakers absent from the Capitol for weeks while 
campaigning for reelection returned for a brief lame-duck session to 
complete the work of the 108th Congress.

The secretive process, Schick noted, gives GOP leaders enormous power to add 
provisions that they or special interests might want, and to delete 
provisions that GOP factions or the White House find objectionable.

Frist, for example, ordered negotiators to accept the abortion provision, 
even though it had never gone to the Senate floor and was only in the 
House-passed version of the bill covering health appropriations. Senate 
opponents agreed not to block its consideration after Frist promised to 
schedule a vote soon on a bill drafted by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to 
repeal the provision.

GOP leaders also deleted provisions on overtime regulations and the 
outsourcing of government jobs despite support in both houses.

"It's not transparent, and it's a breakdown of legislative order," Schick 
said.

Staff writer Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.