| 11/5/2007 9:19:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Don't even ask about the budget
Guest Opinion
by Ryan Alexander
For the first time in five years, Congress has not finished a single spending bill on time.
Lawmakers like to wax poetic about the Congress constitutional power of the purse when defending earmarks and other budgetary goodies. Instead of debating constitutional theory, lawmakers need to roll-up their sleeves and get to work.
Speaking of the Constitution, providing funding for the federal government is one of only constitutionally mandated responsibilities of Congress.
While there have been some justifiable complaints about presidential failure to veto even one spending bill during the last six years - while at the same time earmarking and federal spending exploded - the current congressional leadership hasn't even given him a bill to veto.
The kicker is the president has threatened to veto 9 of the 12 unpassed bills because of differences about policy provisions or spending levels.
The House passed 12 of its spending bills, but the Senate has passed only five. And it doesn't appear any of the few bills that have passed both chambers are ready to be sent to the president. It is not even clear if the House and Senate are meeting to reconcile any of them.
Not since the 1995 showdown has the national budget been in such disarray. Congress and the president bought themselves breathing room this year with a continuing resolution - a measure that will fund the government until Nov. 16. That gives them a couple of weeks to finish work they haven't completed in the last six months.
Some Democrats want to package most of the remaining appropriation bills together - either into one large omnibus spending measure or into a few smaller ones. Republicans are starting to push the idea of a year long continuing resolution to fund the agencies at last year's levels.
Most of what the federal government actually spent all of Fiscal Year 2007 operating under a year long continuing resolution (with the notable exception of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, for which spending bills were completed last year).
Neither of the proposals is the answer. While the nation waits for lawmakers to get to work, both those options are capitulations that Congress cannot get its work done.
Omnibus spending bills end up as enormous, more-than-foot-high piles of legislation that no one has the chance to skim, much less fully read and understand, before passage. And history has taught us that these monstrosities are invitations to mischief.
Another continuing resolution isn't the answer either. Much as we liked the fact the 2007 Fiscal Year continuing resolution left the vast majority of earmarks on the cutting room floor (only the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Defense earmarks remained), auto-funding government year after year is not responsible governance.
Congress needs to get these bills passed and sent to the president. If he chooses to veto any of them, taxpayers and voters expect Congress and the White House to sit down and hammer out their differences like grown-ups. That's how the Founding Fathers envisioned our democracy working.
Instead of overheated rhetoric on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress and the president should follow the plan James Madison wrote.
Ms. Ryan Alexander is president of Taxpayers for Common Sense - a non-partisan federal budget watchdog at www.taxpayer.net. Column distributed by MinutemanMedia.org.
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