Watch out for the riders

(Jonathan Ernst - GETTY IMAGES) There are two separate issues standing between Congress and a deal on funding the government through the rest of 2011. One is the precise level of cuts. Will it be $60-some billion or $30-some billion? The other are what are called “riders”: These are policies, like defunding Planned Parenthood, that got attached to the budget bill during the amendment process. And they’re proving a big problem.

In our interview on Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi observed that there was something of a split in what House Republicans seemed to care about: Freshmen were worried about cuts, she said, while the rest seemed more concerned with riders. Senate staffers have made the same observation to me: The continuing resolution that lost 54 Republicans actually cut spending at about the rate the Tea Party wanted — $6 billion over three weeks, which adds up to more than $100 billion over a full year. The Republican opposition was over the absence of riders, and a majority of the GOP “no” votes were from multi-term members.

This is the consequence, at least in part, of Speaker John Boehner’s decision to offer the legislation under an “open rule” that permitted all sorts of unrelated amendments to get tacked on. The bill thus became a vehicle for a wish list of conservative policies — everything from defunding Planned Parenthood and NPR to attacking the health-care law — and now there are a lot of interest groups and members who are more emotionally committed to something that got added to the bill than to the bill itself. As Jon Bernstein wrote in a prescient article, “instead of sending the Senate a bill carefully tailored for a major budget fight, the House has delivered one containing a hodgepodge of policy fights. Consequently, it will be much harder to find common ground before time runs out to prevent a shutdown.”

The question for Boehner is how to disappoint his members in a way they’ll accept, or alternatively, how to get Senate Democrats to compromise on enough items such that your members can declare victory. I’ve heard some theories for how this might go — perhaps Planned Parenthood’s federal funding will end up being segregated such that the dollars can only go to certain purposes, or perhaps the White House will offer a verbal commitment on entitlements — but no one really knows if a compromise is possible or if we’re just going to need a shutdown to “lower expectations.”