The South Carolina congressman who visited with the Presidential transition team Monday about a job as White House budget chief, is circulating a letter among House colleagues demanding Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R.-Wis.) bring a “clean” continuing resolution for a vote.
“We look forward to working with the new administration to accomplish the conservative agenda we all promised our constituents, and believe that a clean CR is the best way for that work to begin in January,” wrote Rep. John M. “Mick” Mulvaney, who serves on the lower chamber’s Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform committees. A so-called “clean” bill is one that is strictly utilitarian without policy or political impact.
Sources close to the congressman, but not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed to Breitbart News that Mulvaney discussed joining the White House team of President Donald J. Trump as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. At OMB, the South Carolinian would not only have direct supervision of Trump’s budget submissions to Congress, but also direct approval or veto authority over new federal regulations.
Mulvaney’s interest in the job is not a surprise to fans of his Facebook page:
Capitol Hill conservatives, like Mulvaney, are concerned that because funding for the federal government expires Dec. 9, the Republican leadership will be tempted to load up the new, must-pass funding bill with otherwise politically difficult items. Conservatives are also anxious about conducting any serious legislation during a lame duck session, when many of the players are congressmen and senators looking to set themselves up for their return to private life–like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and, of course, President Barack Obama.
Mulvaney wrote in his letter:
The potential inclusion of language relating to issues such as Export-Import Bank quorum requirements, the Restoration of America’s Wire Act, and United Mine Workers of America pension guarantees runs afoul of regular order. There may be a day when a united Republican government wants to address these issues, but when that day comes, it should include committee hearings and markups, floor amendments, and conference reports—not language hidden inside must-pass legislation during a lame duck session of Congress.
Conservatives successfully shut down the Export-Import Bank, the New Deal-era agency that subsidizes foreign trade, for six months in 2015, but the Ex-Im Bank was brought back by Ryan soon after he became speaker Oct. 29, 2015. Republicans leaders are looking to grant the president’s request for changes in the bank’s governance that will make it easier for the bank to take on larger loans.
Both the pension guarantees for the unionized miners and the Restoration of America’s Wire Act–a deceptively titled attempt to outlaw online gambling at the request of Las Vegas magnate and GOP mega-donor Sheldon G. Adelson, have not passed by the appropriate House committees.
When Mulvaney called for a return to “regular order,” he meant the regular legislative process by which bills first pass through committees and then proceed to the House Rules Committee, which approves a “rule” for how the bill will be debated before it comes to the floor for a vote by the whole House.
In the last six years of Republican control of the House, regular order has been broken, as GOP leaders have preferred to reach deals with White House and Capitol Hill Democrats and then pass the bills without input from conservatives by taking bills directing to the floor for passage by Democrats and Republicans allied with leadership.