Congress brings back regular order with bicameral, bipartisan conferences

Congressional negotiators met Wednesday to hash out a long-term transportation bill and rewrite the No Child Left Behind education law, pledging to pin down two bipartisan goals as Capitol Hill seeks a return to the legislative ideal known as regular order.

One by one, House and Senate negotiators set aside grievances with the fine print of each measure to praise the fact that they were sitting across from each other at all. They said bicameral conferences designed to meld competing bills had all but gone extinct in an era of bitter partisanship and backroom deals that avoided the tough give-and-take of true legislating.

“It is a sheer delight to actually be in a real conference committee. I thought I would retire before I saw this again,” said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, a Maryland Democrat who will not seek re-election next year.

The Senate kicked off the session by voting 91-6 to sit down with the House and overhaul the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, which schools said forced them to “teach to the test.” Proposed reforms empower states.

Dubbed the Every Child Achieves Act, the legislation would retain federal math and reading standards but allow states to decide how to measure student and school performance.

It also prohibits Washington from pushing academic standards on the states as a precondition for federal funding — a provision directly aimed at Common Core, a set of standards that conservatives hold up as an example of federal overreach.

Though conservatives felt the bill didn’t do enough to return control to local school boards and Democrats wanted more help for the lowest-performing schools, the bill’s authors remained bullish about the negotiations.

“Both houses will approve our conference work product, and I believe the president will sign the legislation into law,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who worked on the Senate version with Sen. Patty Murray, Washington Democrat.

At the same time, highway conferees are hoping to finish Congress’ first multiyear roads bill in a decade by Dec. 4. That is the expiration date for a two-week funding patch designed to give negotiators enough time to finish their work.

“This is the last extension. Let me put an exclamation point on that,” said House Transportation Committee Chairman Bill Shuster, Pennsylvania Republican.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, and newly elected House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, have put an emphasis on returning to regular order, a type of legislative ideal in which bills wend their way through the committee process with input from members of all stripes.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said the conferences marked a step toward that standard.

Congress had “all but given up” on conference committees in recent years, did less overall and relied on omnibus packages that combined multiple bills. The formation of two conference committees doesn’t amount to a trend, said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies congressional procedure.

“But given the discussion this year — particularly within the GOP House and Senate conferences — about returning to regular order, my sense is that GOP leaders are looking for opportunities to resolve differences the old-fashioned way: sending bipartisan delegations of House and Senate lawmakers to conference to work out differences rather than allowing party leaders to come to agreements behind closed doors,” she said.

Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Republican, said the process still needs work. He said the vote to kick off negotiations on the education bill was held on short notice, limiting the ability of nonconferees to influence the outcome of the negotiations through what are known as “motions to instruct.”

Others were just happy to be sitting in the same room.

“I started off this morning as a conferee on the transportation bill, and I’m spending the afternoon as a conferee on the education bill,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican. “Really, when was the last time we were able to say we were doing this kind of work? So it’s a good day.”

Highway negotiators met early Wednesday to hammer out a $325 billion package that sets forth six years of policy while paying for just three of those years through revenue from the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax and a mix of fees and offsets that some Democrats derided as “gimmicks.”

It also revives the federal Export-Import Bank, a credit agency that financed the sale of U.S. goods overseas but lapsed June 30 amid of conservative cries it doled out “corporate welfare” to businesses that didn’t need it.

Mr. Shuster said the conference plans to finalize its report by Nov. 30, giving Congress just several days to send a final bill to President Obama.

“Obviously, it’s going to be a challenge,” he said. “So we need to buckle down and get to work.”