The revolt by a small minority of House Republicans that nearly derailed Kevin McCarthy’s speakership was as chaotic as it was dysfunctional. With demands all over the map, including some really bad ideas such as adopting left-wing progressive talking points on defense spending, one is tempted to just ignore the rhetoric from this saga and move on. Still, there is a kernel of truth at the heart of the revolutionary angst: The process that enabled the end-of-year monstrosity that was the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act is indeed a gateway to runaway spending and debt. Calling for a return to regular order is a worthy goal and one that hopefully this Congress can address, but before that happens it is important to first understand how we got where we are.

There is no better place to start than by pondering the ramifications of December’s passage of the government’s budget in one large unwieldy package three months after the fiscal year began. Lateness in approving the government budget is now baked into the system. The inability to pass any of the 12 individual appropriations bills separately and on time is the result of the slow death of regular order in the Congress, the rise and consolidation of political power over spending decisions in party leadership, and the need to create an artificial crisis and take defense spending hostage to pass any end of year deal. These trends, incrementally increasing over time, are related and reinforce each other.

Regular order (or the textbook process of how a bill becomes a law) began to die out in the authorization committees in the 1990s with the profound exception of the Armed Services Committees where it still holds on, but just barely. In the non-defense authorization committees discipline waned, processes forgotten, and political passions were allowed to overtake any reasoned debate or compromise. Up until now (this might change as a result of the Speaker deal), partisanship in the House merely manifested itself in the ability of the dominant party to pass anything it wanted to, but then be subsequently ignored by the Senate. It is in the Senate where the breakdown in comity on the authorization committees led to those committees’ irrelevance as it became a waste of time due to Senate rules to bring up any of their bills on the floor.

For a time, the appropriations committees benefited from the breakdown in the authorization process as these were the only annual bills (with the exception of the National Defense Authorization Act) that would be enacted into law and policy legislation attached. This eventually doomed regular order in the appropriations committees as the same furies that had been stirred up on the policy committees could be targeted to crafting amendments to be debated on appropriations bills. Senate leadership recoiled from that possibility and using its control of the floor proactively shut down any such debate.

Without prospects in the Senate for votes on controversial issues the appropriations process stalled. To succeed in funding the government individual appropriations bills needed to be bundled into various omnibus and minibus bills. This was eventually done after passing several continuing resolutions (CRs) all brokered by leadership deals with the administration.

Thus, Senate party leaders in the guise of protecting their members from debating contentious issues and not wanting to see bills bogged down in endless cloture votes used the rules to accrete power to themselves. House leadership then shed crocodile tears as it meekly followed along, blaming the Senate for its own power grab. Thus, the fate of any spending bill rests upon a deal cut by party leaders and whatever Administration happens to be in power. The appropriators became glorified bystanders to their own process just as their authorization colleagues had long become.

The appropriators enabled leadership’s rise by creating the perfect mechanism to force an omnibus agreement. When one decides to pass only one spending bill, defense becomes ever more important – not in comparison to any real national security benefits but in the need to take defense spending captive to achieve an overarching spending deal on domestic issues. To do that the Pentagon needs a different set of spending rules that the appropriators have conveniently created where a CR impacts the Department of Defense more than domestic agencies. Applying the pain of a CR for a few months creates a national security crisis that brings defense hawks to the table and results in more money being spent on non-defense priorities.

Breaking this cycle will not be easy. It will require not only appropriators and authorizers to work together but for leadership to allow serious issues to be debated on the floor and a standalone defense appropriations bill to be passed into law and on time.

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