What the duck is going on with these spending bills?

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — It was, ahem, open season for the big spenders in Washington on Thursday …

… when lawmakers killed two birds with one stone …

… in their hunt for a way to keep the government open, lawmakers gutted a duck bill … because, unable to get their ducks in a row on regular spending bills …

… they passed another continuing resolution.

It is so easy to make fun of what happens on Capitol Hill.

The funny thing on Thursday is that lawmakers funded the US government and averted the immediate threat of a partial government shutdown by using a bill that was originally meant to “amend the Permanent Electronic Duck Stamp Act of 2013 to allow the Secretary of the Interior to issue electronic stamps under such Act, and for other purposes.”

Seriously. Read it here.

The duck stamp act incident of early 2024 sets up two new funding deadlines on March 1 and March 8. It is also, depending on one’s perspective, either an example of what’s wrong with Washington or evidence that right-wing temperatures have temporarily been cooled by still-new House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Imagine if former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, reviled by the right wing of the Republican Party, had tried to pass multiple short-term funding bills, as Johnson has done.

After all, McCarthy was essentially run out of his position by a few conservative members for pushing a short-term funding bill last year, among other things.

Short-term funding bills that keep the lights on are clearly not how the massive US government is supposed to be run. But with Republicans barely in charge of the House, and Democrats barely in charge of the Senate, it’s also an interesting development that the lights are still on.

There’s been least one short-term spending bill in all but three fiscal years since 1977, according to the Congressional Research Service. This fiscal year, which began in October, there have been three. The record, set in fiscal year 2001, is 21, per CRS.

Why use the duck stamp bill to fund the government? Spending bills are supposed to begin in the House, and so to make this latest stopgap measure work, senators substituted the spending bill into a House-passed bill originally having to do with the duck stamp, making it possible for duck hunters to carry an electronic as opposed to paper duck stamp during the “taking of waterfowl.”

Fear not for the duck hunters. The Senate version of the Duck Stamp Modernization Act became law last month.

And so the end result is the government stays funded because of a bill that, strictly speaking, was already dead. Dead duck?

This episode does not suggest there is a new era of bipartisanship. There is no deal between lawmakers for a long-term funding bill to get the government through the year. And the patience of the right-wing lawmakers who voted to oust McCarthy is clearly wearing thin with Johnson.

But lawmakers now have until early March to pass the long-term bills that were originally supposed to be passed by the end of last September.

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