By Billy House, THE NATIONAL JOURNAL
Just six months after “compromise” and “regular order” were all in vogue with passage of the two-year Bipartisan Budget Act, bygone phrases like “continuing resolution,” “omnibus legislation,” and “lame-duck battle” have crept back into the conversations on Capitol Hill, and it may not be long before “shutdown threat” is again part of the lexicon too.
“There is an increased feeling we are heading into resolving this in a lame duck,” said a senior House Republican aide, whose sentiments were echoed a short time later by a Democratic aide.
“This,” of course, is the fiscal 2015 budget, the details of which were supposed to be determined this year through passage under regular order of 12 separate appropriations bills. The two-year budget deal approved in December laid out the broad parameters, and the Appropriations committees in both the House and Senate simply needed to fill in the fine print.