By now, the basic elements of last week’s drama on Capitol Hill are widely known. House Speaker Mike Johnson reached a bipartisan agreement to prevent a government shutdown; Elon Musk and a variety of Republican officials balked; GOP officials started stripping measures from the legislation; and eventually a package worked its way to the White House before the deadline.
Of particular interest, however, were the federal investments in cancer research that Republicans removed from the agreement. Because we discussed this last week, it’s important to emphasize that one of the measures that was eliminated ended up becoming law anyway. The New York Times reported:
After a tumultuous few days, President Biden on Saturday signed into law a spending bill that had been heavily trimmed down to 120 pages from 1,547. It had lost provisions targeting hidden fees on concert tickets and criminalizing the publication of some deepfake pornography. But two of the measures that had been dropped from the final bill … were salvaged as separate bills and passed by the Senate.
This gets a little complicated, but bear with me.
There were several measures related to cancer research that House Republicans scrapped, including efforts to make it easier for low-income families to cross state lines for medically complex pediatric cancer treatments, as well as bills intended to encourage production of new pediatric cancer treatments.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein, an MSNBC contributor, also reported that GOP lawmakers ended funding for the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program — named after a 10-year-old Virginia girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor in 2013 — that helped to fund pediatric cancer research. The policy had long enjoyed bipartisan support, and since it was up for reauthorization this year, no one was especially surprised when it was included in the stopgap bill, ensuring that the program would continue for another decade.
When House Republicans took out their editing pens, however, the program was removed, too.
The bad news for health advocates is that nearly all of the measures related to cancer research could not be rescued before lawmakers wrapped up their work. The good news for health advocates is that Senate Democrats, taking advantage of the fact that the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program passed the House months earlier as a freestanding bill, successfully sought unanimous consent to save the policy and keep the initiative in place through 2031.
At this point, some readers are probably asking a good question: If the legislation already passed the lower chamber months earlier, why didn’t the Senate Democratic majority bring it to the floor earlier? Why blame House Republicans for killing a bill related to pediatric cancer research if the GOP-led House already advanced the program?
I’m afraid this is the complicated part. Because of the way the Senate operates, and the time it takes to pass anything through the upper chamber, the Senate generally avoids taking up relatively small, standalone policies. The calendar just won’t allow it. Members instead wait for larger spending packages and simply attach the smaller bills.
To be sure, we can have a discussion about whether Capitol Hill should work this way, but there can be no doubt that this is how the modern congressional process works. It’s precisely why House Republicans were blamed last week for eliminating the program: GOP members understood that by taking the items related to cancer research out of the continuing resolution, they were necessarily putting the programs in real jeopardy. Fortunately, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia stepped up and rescued the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Program, so this element of the larger effort survived the Republican editing process. The same cannot be said of the other cancer-related measures — efforts to make it easier for low-income families to cross state lines for medically complex pediatric cancer treatments, as well as bills intended to encourage production of new pediatric cancer treatments — that were supposed to be a part of the spending package, but didn’t make the final package after being removed by House GOP leaders. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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