As I said when I started this blog, I’m often inaccurate in my prognostications about Congress. Being unpredictable is a characteristic of Capitol Hill.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote that Congress has a habit of cramming for “finals” at various times of the year just before long breaks. It was possible that important workplace policy might be attached to non-related bills in an effort to push it through.

I was wrong. No major riders were attached to a massive (approximately 1,400 pages) bill that will fund the government for the next fiscal year. Congress approved the measure Wednesday, December 19.

E. Neil Trautwein, vice president and employee benefits counsel at the National Retail Federation, said House members and senators refrained from attaching extraneous items to the spending bill because they wanted to get home.

They were already 2½ months late approving government spending levels. The omnibus encompassed funding for 11 federal agencies. In fairness to the Democratic majorities, President Bush vetoed one stand-alone appropriations bill and threatened to torpedo others that exceeded the spending caps he outlined.

“Congress made the decision to have as few ornaments on the tree as possible so that the process didn’t get slowed,” Trautwein said. “They have no desire to be here longer than they have to be.”

In Washington, the Christmas tree metaphor is often used to describe loading up a bill with amendments. For Trautwein and others representing business interests, the fact that riders did not decorate the spending bill was an early Christmas present.

Trautwein feared that genetic discrimination and mental health parity legislation would be surreptitiously slipped into the omnibus. Both bills have been addressed by committees. Genetic discrimination has been passed by the House and mental health parity by the Senate.

But critical work remains in ironing out differences between the bodies on each bill. Negotiations would have been curtailed if they’d hopped a ride on the government funding vehicle.

Now both measures remain on the congressional “to do” list. The challenge will be to get to them during an election year, when politics and a limited number of session days tend to truncate the legislative process.

“The only question in my mind is if they move on their own or if anything moves at all,” Trautwein says.

The reaction to what didn’t happen as Congress was hurrying to get home for the holidays can reveal much about what lies ahead in Washington.

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, keep an eye on organized labor. That movement was upset by a rider that was not attached to the omnibus bill. It would have blocked the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor Management Standards from implementing changes in conflict-of-interest disclosure forms.

The Republican side of the House Education and Labor Committee asserted that the updated forms would “provide greater transparency and more meaningful information to rank-and-file union members.”

That wasn’t labor’s view. In a statement, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney rebuked the Democratic majorities for backing off when the GOP objected to the rider. He called the disclosure policy a “rank new directive from the Bush Labor Department” that would require “more than 100,000 workplace volunteers to report their run-of-the-mill consumer transactions to the federal government.”

Sweeney served notice that he expected Democrats to do better by labor, which provided much funding and grass-roots support for the party’s takeover of Congress in 2006.

“As we go into 2008, the Democrats must stand their ground on behalf of the voters who elected them to lead,” Sweeney said. He also promised to use labor’s electoral might to defeat Republican “obstructionists.”

If labor helps Democrats increase their majorities and capture the White House in 2008, look for it to demand changes at the National Labor Relations Board. Last week, a joint House-Senate hearing on recent NLRB rulings left no doubt that Democrats believe the Bush-majority board is fundamentally anti-union.

Democratic leaders haven’t ruled out the possibility of introducing legislation to overturn recent NLRB rulings. And they have sent a signal to Bush not to reappoint NLRB members without a thorough vetting by the Senate.

They’re laying the groundwork for 2008 and beyond. At the December 13 hearing, Rep. George Miller, D-California, said, “It’s important to start building this record to protect basic rights.”

Robert Battista, who was NLRB chairman at the time of the hearing but whose term expired December 16, hypothesized that organized labor and Democrats were messaging at the meeting.

“Unions want to build momentum for labor law reform,” he said in an interview after his testimony. “This [hearing] might be part and parcel of that.”

Pay attention to the 2008 campaigns to learn more.