Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it his central goal this year to get the spending process back on track. | AP Photo GOP weighs plan to further gut filibuster

Senate Republicans will make one last effort to reform the Senate's arcane rulebook this month, in hopes of putting the chamber on course to pass all 12 appropriations bills this year.

On Wednesday, shortly before heading to Baltimore for a joint retreat with House Republicans, the Senate GOP will huddle over strategies to speed the passage of spending legislation, according to a notice given to chiefs of staff obtained by POLITICO.


The discussion, led by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, will focus on a proposal to potentially eliminate an individual senator's power to filibuster a spending bill before it's even debated on the Senate floor.

Last year, Senate Democrats used just such a filibuster to force a bipartisan budget deal after they blocked a massive defense spending measure from being brought up for debate via a "motion to proceed” to the bill.

This year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made it his central goal to get the spending process back on track — and eliminating one of two opportunities for the minority to filibuster spending bills is under serious consideration. Votes to end debate are also subject to a 60-vote threshold, so opponents of a spending bill would still have a chance to block the measure.

Alexander said no formal proposal will be unveiled on Wednesday during the Senate GOP conference, but time is urgent as he believes such reforms are only possible many months in advance of the election. Instead, Alexander and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), along with four Senate freshmen, will hash out what they studied over the past month under the direction of McConnell: How to get the Senate’s long, stalled appropriations process unstuck.

“We’ve talked a lot. The concern that has come out most often is about the standing around and waiting, that there’s too much time when nothing is going on,” Alexander said in a telephone interview. “We feel like we’ve had a fairly productive year, except for the appropriations process.”

McConnell is aiming to pass a budget for 2017, based on last year’s two-year budget deal, as soon as possible and begin writing spending bills immediately after. His ultimate goal is clearing the entire appropriations process through Congress for the first time in 22 years. Scuttling the filibuster on the motion to proceed would streamline the process significantly, shaving a couple days off the timeline for processing each spending measure.

But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is deeply skeptical of any move to gut the legislative filibuster, as are a number of Senate conservatives. Those members of the GOP conference’s right flank believe that giving appropriations bills special status and eliminating a procedural leverage point for individual members serves only to further empower Reid, McConnell and their successors.

“Looks like this is further an effort to centralize power,” said one aide familiar with ongoing discussions over the Senate rules. “What you’re doing is, you’re giving one Senate committee more power.” Brian Darling, a former top aide to Sen. Rand Paul, said that “removing the right to filibuster the motion to proceed to appropriations bills would be the beginning of the end of the filibuster.”

A senior Republican aide rebutted those notions by arguing that under current Senate rules, Democrats can more easily blockade spending bills and then force backroom negotiations on catch-all spending bills. Those talks are almost always run by the top leaders, which effectively boxes out rank-and-file lawmakers.

“What do these guys want, an omnibus every year?” said the aide.

It may all be a moot point. Alexander and other Senate Republicans say they won't use the Senate’s “nuclear option,” which requires just a slight majority to change the Senate rules and was famously used by Reid to gut the filibuster on all nominations but those to the Supreme Court in 2013.

So Republican leaders would need 67 votes to pass a rules change, a tall order in the divided Senate.

Reid has entered into a gentleman’s agreement with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to take a fresh look at the appropriations process, which funds the government via 12 individual bills that cover the myriad federal agencies. He even entered a statement into the congressional record vowing not to use the spending bills to score political points in late December.

But this is not enough for many House members, who are routinely frustrated with the Senate’s inability to move spending bills. House leaders have their own problems keeping the government funding process on track, and just last year, a debate over the Confederate flag scuttled a spending bill and helped derail the whole process. But getting bills to the floor for debate is not the problem in the House.

The Senate is “just a huge impediment, because we’re trying to move forward in good faith on regular order,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), a member of the House’s rowdy Freedom Caucus. “A gentleman’s agreement that I’m not in the room for, to me, isn’t as as valuable as a promise on paper.”

But Reid seems unwilling to go there, aides said. House conservatives were even pushing elimination of the filibuster on appropriations bills in last year’s budget deal, and Reid seemed exasperated when asked why he wouldn’t agree to it.

“I can’t imagine why you would ask that question,” Reid said when asked about the matter in an interview late last year. “They would love to write rules for the Senate, but we do not want the Senate to be like the House.”

Republicans noted that Reid has in the past criticized the practice of filibustering bills before they can even be debated, but seems to have found new love for the tactic as minority leader. But a senior Democratic aide said there’s no sense in losing leverage to reject poison-pill spending riders and allowing Republicans to unilaterally bring up defense spending bills while potentially ignoring Democratic priorities like health care spending bills.

Alexander said he would move quickly to brief Reid and other Democratic leaders, perhaps as soon as next week.

“There are a number of Democrats, including the Democratic leaders … who've expressed an interest in this. And we’re going to meet with them about what we’ve talked about because our goal is to something by consensus, which requires 67 votes,” Alexander said.

From there, the rules reform package would go to the Senate Rules Committee, chaired by Blunt with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the likely next Democratic leader, as the ranking member. It’s the same place where Republicans had hoped to codify a rule subjecting all nominations, including to the nation’s highest court, to a majority vote threshold.

But Democrats balked over the controversial proposal, and Republicans are now concentrating on something they hope is less contentious.

“We know better than to bite off more than we can chew,” Alexander said. “We’re working to simplify, not complicate.”