Like shooting a starting gun, House GOP leadership will set off a staffer scramble when they post the text of their proposed omnibus spending bill Tuesday night. Though some lawmakers have debated specifics for weeks, they won’t know what’s in the package until the last minute.
It’s still up in the air if they’ll even have time to read the $1.1 trillion measure before they vote on it.
As an omnibus bill, the legislation totals 2,009 pages. Even for the experienced and heavily caffeinated staffer, that’s a heavy reading assignment.
Tackling this omnibus bill will prove a herculean task if the staffs of individual House members try to read the entire thing.
Last year’s omnibus package, passed under then-House Speaker John Boehner, was longer than George R.R. Martin’s 700-page “A Game of Thrones.”
Thicker than most phone books at 1,603 pages, that bill contained intricate provisions appropriating an entire year of spending.
It’s not clear how much time House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., will give members to slog through this year’s version.
In recent days, Ryan has remained unfazed under looming deadlines, dismissing them as “arbitrary.” The speaker blew past a Dec. 11 target date, then cobbled together a stopgap spending patch to keep the government funded.
Ryan will have to run the same play to keep the lights on for lawmakers.
At a Tuesday breakfast event hosted by Politico, the speaker said the House would “have to do another short-term [spending patch], because we’re not going to waive this three-day rule we have.”
According to the GOP’s 2010 “Pledge to America,” the three-day rule is meant to “ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote.”
But the political definition of a day remains ambiguous on Capitol Hill.
Republican aides told The Daily Signal that under Boehner, leadership would “squeeze three days into as little as 24 hours.”
At that time, many conservatives complained, for instance, that leadership would post the text of a bill before midnight on a Monday then call a vote immediately after midnight Wednesday.
Though seen as a reformer, Ryan may follow suit and give the House just three consecutive days instead of a full 72 hours.
A Ryan aide said the speaker “will honor the three-day rule” and referred The Daily Signal to both the 2010 Pledge to America and official House rules.
But on Sunday, a Wisconsin newspaper quoted Ryan as saying the House passed reforms to customs laws “the way it should be done—in the light of day.” He said he has “kept the 72-hour rule in place, which means people get to see what’s in these bills.”
Asked to clarify, a Ryan aide said the speaker may have misspoken.
A key point of the Wisconsin Republican’s agenda has been returning the House to a procedural norm known as regular order. He already has taken steps by empowering members to share input and entrusting committees to take the lead in crafting legislation.
During his inaugural speech Oct. 29, Ryan urged colleagues “to study up and do the homework” before casting their votes:
When we do not follow regular order—when we rush to pass bills a lot of us do not understand—we are not doing our job. Only a fully functioning House can truly represent the people.
After the Paris terror attacks Nov. 13, Ryan guided the House to a bipartisan agreement on Syrian refugees in less than a week. Against a tight Thanksgiving deadline, House leadership posted that bill for roughly 36 hours of review.
That legislation, however, was less than six pages long.
Ryan regularly has called for the House to consider appropriations bills one at a time rather than in the bundled package known as the omnibus.
This story was updated to include the page total of the newly released spending bill.
