The soap opera that is the 113^th Congress took another dramatic turn in its final days. After hours of intrigue, the House of Representatives passed the fiscal year 2015 CROmnibus to continue to fund government. Now it’s up to the Senate to pass the bill this weekend. But the drama could continue for months.

The 219-206 vote came just three hours before the continuing resolution funding the government since October 1^st was set to expire, and only 49 hours after the 1,603 page bill (plus the accompanying 1,274 pages of explanatory material) were released. If lawmakers read everything, they were speedy. Allowing for about an hour of sleep, they would’ve needed to have read about a page a minute to cover all the material of the $1.1 trillion bill.

Rough sailing for the CROmnibus was foretold earlier in the day. Before a big bill comes to the floor, the House typically adopts a “rule” setting terms of debate, time for consideration, what amendments can be offered, etc. As a merely procedural vote, they’re typically passed along party lines or by near unanimous agreement. The majority party hardly ever loses on a rule vote, to do so would be quite embarrassing. The CROmnibus rule squeaked by 214-212 with 16 Republicans and all the Democrats voting no. The rule even needed Speaker Boehner’s vote (by tradition the Speaker rarely votes) and a couple Republicans to switch their vote at the last minute under pressure. This was the harbinger of nine hours of hard core lobbying by House Republican leaders, the President, and Vice President to ensure passage.

It didn’t have to be this way. The top line spending levels for fiscal year 2015 were agreed to by the House, Senate, and White House a year ago – months earlier than normal. But instead of using this time to write, debate, and enact the twelve spending bills responsibly, the House passed seven. The Senate passed zero. Neither chamber even produced one of the larger ones, the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education spending bill. Instead they waited until the post-election lame duck, went into the back room and hammered out deals with the most senior members of the Appropriations Committee and House and Senate leadership. Not only were hundreds of millions of Americans in the dark as to what was being decided, but hundreds of members of Congress were too. It’s hardly surprising that it blew up in their face. Not just because of the funding levels, but also because of policy riders that reach far beyond normal appropriations material. Lawmakers who work in these areas and/or have jurisdiction over them are understandably outraged that they weren’t consulted. In fact, we‘ll all be finding out about provisions hidden in the bill for months to come.

We’ve already found plenty. That’s how we know that lawmakers added four more of the troubled F-35s at a cost of $479 million. The Farm Service Agency can’t close any of its more than 2,500 field offices, even if they’re empty or within 20 miles of another one. Instead of sensibly putting the troubled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MOX) project in “cold-standby,” Congress expressly prohibited it and dumped in another $149 million to keep it moving along. And even though it’s still sitting on $4 billion of post-Superstorm Sandy funding, the Army Corps of Engineers got $1 billion “for work that either was not included in the Administration's request or was inadequately budgeted.” That’s Congress’ way of pushing funding toward projects that used to survive on earmarks.   You can be sure we will continue digging for a good while.

But don’t you worry. The fun doesn’t end here. As one last instance of adding insult to injury, the 113^th Congress only included 11 of the twelve spending bills in the CROmnibus. The last one, Homeland Security, only got a continuing resolution through February 27, 2015 (putting the CR in CROmnibus). This was nominally to put pressure on the President regarding the immigration Executive Order issued last month (it also didn’t go far enough for some House conservatives, which is one of the reasons they opposed the bill). So instead of a clean slate, the 114^th Congress will have some unfinished business. And to be clear, immigration enforcement is not all that is affected at Homeland Security. It also impacts the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Secret Service, and others.

In the New Year we’ll have a new Congress, a President focused on his legacy rather than reelection, and two years before the next election. It’s time to stop the theatrics and get to doing the people’s business.