Leadership from both sides of the aisle broadcast their opinions about the SBA budget and reauthorization contained in the Omnibus FY2005 Appropriations bill

In spite of the weekend scramble that took place a week ago to finish the budget, federal lawmakers wound up passing another Continuing Resolution last week to give the House time to reconvene on the legislation one more time.

No doubt by now you've heard about that particularly creepy provision, which was slipped into the gigantic spending bill by a couple of House staffers, that would have given access to citizens' income tax returns to Congressional aides. That's the kind of thing that happens when Congress diddles around so long that they don't get their budget chores done in time.

Then, they have to go with these gigantic spending bills — this one, which covers nine of thirteen appropriations bills, is a mind-boggling 3,300 pages or so — that they wind up voting on without actually reading.

"We've reached the bizarre point where we approve hundreds of billions of dollars of bills without anyone seeing them," Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview with the New York Times last Tuesday. "And then we're shocked — shocked! — that a provision should sneak in which is onerous."

Nicely put.

While the Representatives and Senators are making noises about what they're going to do to put a stop to this kind of dangerous stuff, members of the House and Senate Small Business Committees have been making their sentiments about the relevant provisions in the legislation known to the press.

All things considered, the reactions are pretty much what one might have expected from the various parties involved.

House Small Business Committee Chairman Don Manzullo (R-IL), who gets brownie points for being first out of the gate with his opinion on the subject, unilaterally praised the work of Congress with a bill that "strengthens the Small Business Administration and its popular loan guarantee programs for two years."

Given that Manzullo is taking credit for brokering a deal between the feuding factions in the House, the Senate and the White House, it is hardly surprising that he has nothing bad to say about the legislation -- not even the move to zero subsidy for the 7(a) program, which he has cautiously supported since it was forwarded in the President's fiscal 2005 budget proposal.

"This legislation reauthorizes the programs of the Small Business Administration for two years while strengthening the SBA's most popular programs ... . By removing federal subsidies, it saves taxpayers between $70 million and $80 million and for the first time makes the 7(a) program self sustaining without the need for Congressional action," Manzullo said in a press statement. "... [T]he changes in this bill will stabilize and improve these SBA programs and others so the agency can continue to help America's small employers expand and create jobs."

Of course, he does not mention that the savings to taxpayers will be coming out of the pockets of lenders and borrowers in the SBA's 7(a) loan program. But possibly he feels he doesn't need to point that out since he can count on his colleague from across the aisle to do it for him.

Referring to the hike in fees as a new tax on small business owners, Small Business Committee Ranking Member Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) issued her own press statement on the budget. "These moves clearly show that Republicans simply don't believe these programs should operate as public-private partnerships. If the Bush administration continues down this road, our government's historical commitment to small business will be eliminated altogether," Velázquez said.

Over in the Senate, Small Business Committee Chair Olympia Snowe (R-ME) did not quite uniformly sing the praises of the SBA's funding for fiscal 2005, although the lack of a budget appropriation for 7(a) is not one of the things she complained about.

On the floor of the Senate, she expressed her overarching concern that the SBA's budget has been cut by about 32% since fiscal 2001, which she doesn't see as the right move to make when everybody is worried about job creation. She is also unhappy about the fact that neither the Small Business Research Innovation program nor the Small Business Technology Transfer program were funded for fiscal 2005 — which won't be the first time the Bush Administration tried to eliminate these two small business grant programs.

At the same time, Small Business Committee Ranking Member John Kerry (D-MA) does not appear to be any happier about what has happened to the 7(a) program than his counterpart in the House. "Republican leaders in Congress have rubber-stamped a proposal by President Bush that makes it even harder for small businesses to borrow money in America. That is simply wrong," he said in his own press statement.

It is interesting to note that there is nothing readily available in the public record indicating that either Senator Kerry or Congresswoman Velázquez offered any amendments on the floor of their respective chambers to either reinstate the lowered 7(a) fees or the funding for the 7(a) subsidy. This is not necessarily to say that they didn't try; in fact, Senator Kerry complained about that in his floor statement.

"The only people who have had a chance to review and amend the bill are the Republican leadership and the White House, and all of that went on behind closed doors," Kerry said in his floor statement.

That would certainly be in keeping in the oft-repeated observation that this White House prefers to operate with a disconcerting degree of secrecy, as if it would be a bad thing if the public actually knew what they were doing.

"This is no way to do the people's work," Kerry added.

It is also interesting to note that Congresswoman Velázquez voted for the bill, in spite of her unhappiness with the small business provisions. On other hand, Senator Kerry was one of 30 Senators who voted against it.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this entire process is the preview it may afford of what the 109th Congress is going to be like. If that is the case, then it may be that lawmakers will certainly get more done in their upcoming session but, if they are going to shut out the minority party, what they end up doing may or may not be in keeping with the promises recently made on the campaign trail.

And it certainly does not augur well for that lofty but elusive ideal of changing the tone in Washington for the better. Indeed, if we thought the 108th Congress was bitterly partisan, the writing on the wall seems to be pointing toward matters getting much worse during the 109th.