Stick a fork in it, for now
Senators gave their final blessing to the budget this morning, shifting the tax and spending fun to the House.
About the only thing anyone can say for sure at this point is that House members wouldn't pass the Senate's proposal verbatim, even without the lottery provisions.
So after a few days of trying to learn the ways of the budget (and the Senate) I'm back in my office catching up on everything else I've been ignoring. Among those things is Rep. Howard Coble's potential run-in with ethics problems. (Yeah, yeah, he's in D.C., but he's from N.C.)
Coble took a trip to London and Ireland in 2003. The thing he might have done wrong (aids say the paperwork was just done incorrectly and will likely be exonerated) was allow a lobbyist to pay for part of that trip.
The funny bit is, Coble wrote to the House ethics committee before going on the trip to ask if he was going to run afoul of the chamber's ethics guidelines. The committee wrote back that they thought the trip would be okay. We'll have more on this in tomorrow's paper.