WASHINGTON -- The House is getting pretty cranky these days.
True, individual House members sound off all the time. Collectively, however, the House has been unusually ill-tempered in two votes on appropriations bills last month and in a third, involving student loans, in July.
On the receiving end of the House's wrath have been the Senate, appropriations lawmakers, a House committee chairman, and even the House leadership.
In all three cases. House legislators were trying to repudiate costly, controversial provisions that were buried in bigger bills. Apparently, they resent being forced to vote on the bigger bills without being able to decide separately on the controversial spending programs they oppose.
One of the October votes involved an item in the 1994 spending bill for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and independent agencies. The House version of the bill killed funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to build the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, a new type of booster for the space shuttle.
The Senate's bill included funds for the rocket motor. House-Senate conferees charged with reconciling the two bills sided with the Senate, and kept the rocket motor funding in the compromise version of the legislation.
But the House dug in its heels, voting overwhelmingly to block the compromise bill from coming to the floor for final approval. That sent the bill back to the conferees, who bowed to the House's wishes and removed the rocket motor funding. Seeing how insistent the House was, the Senate acquiesced and approved the amended bill.
The second October showdown mirrors the first. Again, the problem was with an appropriations bill -- this time, the 1994 spending measure for energy and water development projects.
The Senate version of the bill included $640 million to continue construction in 1994 of the Superconducting Super Collider, the giant atom smasher project in Texas. The House had voted to terminate the project.
Once again, conferees sided with the Senate and voted to include the super collider funding in the final bill. Once again, the House voted by a sizable margin to send the bill back into the conference committee, with instructions to remove the offending collider provision. And again, the Senate bowed to the House's wishes, approving an energy appropriations bill containing only phase-out funding for the collider.
The third recent target of the House's displeasure was a bill enacted in August to revamp the federal college aid system. The new law phases in a program of so-called direct loans, made by colleges, with an eye toward eliminating the current bank-financed system.
The strongest proponent of the student loan bill in the House, Education and Labor Committee Chairman Rep. William D. Ford, D-Mich., rammed the college aid bill through his panel in May. The full House approved the measure as part of a mammoth deficit-reduction package late that month.
In bringing the student loan measure to the floor, the House leadership ignored the cries of rank-and-file members that they did not believe the cost savings estimates for direct loans and did not want to see the provision swept along on the coattails of the bigger deficit package.
As the summer wore on, many House lawmakers became more and more frustrated that they had not had the opportunity to vote separately on the student loan measure. Although they let the deficit package through unscathed, their frustration boiled over in July when they voted on an unrelated bill to fund education programs.
During debate on the funding bill, the House overwhelmingly voted to add an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., that restricts the amount of money the Department of Education will be able to spend on a direct lending program in 1994.
The provision had little practical affect, because it did not stop the direct loan program from being enacted. But Capitol Hill watchers took it as a sign of the House's deep discontent with the idea of direct lending.
The three House votes are strong signals that House legislators believe the process for approving spending measures is not working. The votes demonstrate that the legislators are not afraid to challenge the Senate, or even their own committee chairmen, in an effort to improve the process.
