REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Budget Trap
Voters will hold Republicans accountable if they keep spending like Democrats.
Republicans in Congress have been patting themselves on the back since Election Day, but maybe they should pay more attention to the pummeling they've been taking in the past few weeks. Democrats have been scoring by attacking the majority GOP as the party of big, intrusive government.
Never mind the irony, Republicans have only themselves to blame. The problem is that they are still trying to pass a budget under a process designed when Democrats were in the majority to make it easier to spend taxpayer money without public or executive oversight. After a decade in control of Congress, maybe it's time Republicans changed the rules to serve their purported belief in limited government.
One terrible habit is to pass most of the annual federal budget in one giant, last-minute spending bill. Democrats refined this technique to escape Ronald Reagan's veto scrutiny, but now Republicans use it to stuff their own goodies into corners that might be overlooked by the media and White House.
This blew up in their faces last month when Democrats discovered a provision that would have given Members of Congress access to individual tax returns. The intention was apparently to let Congress inspect IRS performance, but the language was so sloppy that it would have allowed the intrusion into taxpayer privacy. Republicans tried to remove the language by voice vote with few Members in attendance, but Democrats unsurprisingly demanded a recorded vote to extend the GOP's political embarrassment.
This is what happens when no one but a few staffers really knows what is in a bill that is 3,646 pages and more than a foot high. We remember, circa 1994, when Republicans denounced Democrats for not reading the bills that they passed. Now the GOP is guilty of the same practice, which is a recipe for all sorts of secret pork and mayhem getting into law. Is it too much to ask that every bill get at least three legislative days, after it is in final written form, for the Members to read it?
Democrats have also learned to skewer Republicans for their individual "earmarks," which by one account total 18,000 this year and add up to $22 billion. These pork-barrel classics--e.g., $1 million for a "Wild American Shrimp Initiative"--obscure the larger truth that this year's spending bill is actually the first in years to show some restraint. Domestic non-defense discretionary spending will rise by less than 2% in Fiscal Year 2005. But what many voters will remember instead is that Republican incumbents are as spendthrift as Democratic incumbents.
A solution here is for Republicans to change the current budget rules, which were passed by Democrats in 1974 over a Watergate-weakened President Nixon. Those rules were deliberately designed to obscure the budget process to make it easier to spend, and to reduce Presidential leverage over spending decisions. Republicans denounced them throughout the 1980s, but now they embrace them as tools of incumbent protection.
One alternative would be to give the President enhanced rescission authority, which is the power to send individual spending items back to the Congress for an expedited up-or-down vote. This is a relative of the line-item veto, a long-time GOP campaign staple. But earlier this year GOP chairmen of the Appropriations Committee--a k a the College of Cardinals, or Lords of Lard--twisted arms to defeat the measure on the floor of the House.
Another useful proposal would give the annual budget "resolutions" the force of law, so that the Members couldn't blow out their spending limits at the end of the year. This too would shift the balance of budget power away from the Appropriators and to the broader House and Senate membership.
With control of the House, Senate and White House, Republicans are now going to be held accountable for Congress's decisions. If they talk like conservatives but spend like Democrats, voters may decide to elect the real thing.
