Flap shows peril can lurk in 3,000-page spending bill

By The Washington Post and The Associated Press

Rep. Ernest Istook, denied role in IRS provision.

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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 huge spending bill funding domestic departments in 2005.

But Democrats — and some Republicans — said the incident highlighted the recent trend in Congress not to pass spending bills by the Oct. 1 start of the fiscal year and then have to combine unpassed bills into giant omnibus packages before Congress adjourns for the year. The bill approved Saturday, which included nine of the 13 spending bills Congress has to act on every year, ran more than 3,000 pages.

"There is no earthly way" for lawmakers and their staffs to learn what's in these bills in the few hours they have to inspect them before the vote, said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.

	Sen. Kent Conrad said bill's contents uncertain.

"What else is in this stack of paper that people don't know about?" he asked.

Republicans hope to quell the uproar over the provision tomorrow, when the House is set to adopt a resolution repealing it. The Senate took that action Saturday.

Conrad said the chairmen of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, which are responsible for tax law, already have authority to see income-tax returns. "They are under very stringent penalties, both civil and criminal, if ever they release that information," Conrad said.

He said the new provision would have given "unfettered power," not subject to penalty, to the Appropriations chairmen and their agents. Those agents could be anybody, including political-party officials looking for incriminating material on opponents, he said.

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. Yesterday, IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said the IRS commissioner "was unaware of the provision until after it was already approved. He strongly supports it being deleted from the final bill."

	Sen. Bill Frist dubbed it "Istook amendment."

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 Istook Jr., R-Okla., who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS.

But Istook said in a written statement yesterday 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."

Some top Republicans were less charitable. Speaking on the Senate floor Saturday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Kan., who chairs the tax-writing Finance Committee, called the provision an "outrage" and said it would "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, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. "It shows ... how easy it is to put something in [an omnibus bill] without anybody else knowing about it." The giant bill contains hundreds of other provisions that could not be enacted into law if they were offered as single bills requiring full debate and scrutiny, he said.

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 domestic spending, failed to agree on a budget blueprint, required by law.

The impasse forced delays in drafting many 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.

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 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.

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 re-election 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.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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