The December 1984 Atlantic Monthly had an article by Gregg Easterbrook titled, "What's Wrong with Congress." With a title like that, I had to take a look and I recommend it since not much has changed since then. However, the article was written at a time when readers had a much longer attention span, so be prepared for a very long read.
Since the article covers so much territory, I'll summarize the points that grabbed me. Easterbrook relates the current (1984) problems to the removal of the seniority system a decade earlier. Until the mid 70s, senior senators and representatives controlled just about everything that happened in Congress. Other members could gain seniority only when the seniors retired or died, and they knew that they had to follow the seniors' wishes or lose out.
Many of the senior members of Congress were from the South, mostly Dixiecrats. Civil rights was the dominant issue and the public demanded progress on this and other issues. Congress was under a lot of pressure to change the way it conducted business and they decided to remove the seniority system.
emoval of the seniority system was good because it made Congress more representative of America's diverse regions. But it was bad because it left no one in charge and it caused a proliferation of committees and subcommittees.
When the seniority system was in effect, the work of Congress flowed smoothly and on time, even if certain regions of America lost out on funding because they didn't have a senior member of Congress. Without the seniority system, the work of Congress slowed and the status of any bill or act became impossible to predict.
Removal of the seniority system was also bad because it happened about the same time that television news discovered the sound bite. Television news was never good at reporting on complicated issues or proceedings. Since Congress is always dealing with complicated issues and must conduct long and boring proceedings or hearings, Congress and TV news were never a good match.
However, the newly freed Representatives and Senators were free to talk and promote themselves to their constituents back home. TV reporters and Members of Congress discovered the sound bite. It was a marriage made in heaven for the participants. TV could pack more material, that looked and sound like news. Members of Congress could get exposure without ever exposing their thought processes to public review.
Here are some of Easterbrook's examples Congressional troubles, and my comments and my titles:
Confusion Abounds
"Recently Congress voted for a $749 billion package of tax cuts, and only a few months later was locked in debate over a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. The House voted in favor of Ronald Reagan's plan to almost double the number of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal, and not long after voted in favor of the nuclear freeze."
"...many spending bills have not been completed until months after the spending they supposedly control has begun. ... and these often contain "unprinted amendments" whose contents congressmen have never had an opportunity to read."
Morris Udall said, "The end of the seniority system; the arabesque budget "process" and other time-consuming new additions like the War Powers Act; the transformation from party loyalty to political-action-committee (PAC) loyalty; the increased emphasis on media campaigning; the vogue of running against Washington and yet being a member of the Washington establishment; the development of ideological anti-campaigns; a dramatic increase in congressional-subcommittee power and staff size, and a parallel increase in the scope and intensity of lobbying--all are creations of the past fifteen years. Some have served to make the nation's legislature more democratic and to improve its contact with the public. Others have made congressmen more frantic and timorous. But every change has in some respect caused Congress to become more difficult to run. Right now there isn't anyone in charge, and there may never be again."
Easterbrook evaluates: "More than any other factor, the deregulation of subcommittees has increased Congress's workload and decreased its cohesion."
e still have much of this with us today. I find it absurd that Congress can propose tax cuts and then pretend to vote for a balanced budget. The key element of this dishonesty is to pass "temporary" resolutions that produce an budget deficit and increases the allowed debt. These resolutions are rarely temporary.
Negative Campaigning and Workloads
"Since low attendance (on the floor of Congress) has an instant negative connotation, one of the easiest ways for a challenger to attack an incumbent congressman is to hammer at a "bad attendance record" on floor votes--a tactic that avoids the issue of whether the congressman might have made more meaningful use of his time."
"Because of the regularity with which redundant floor votes occur, Congress "never finishes anything, never arrives at a decision," according to Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska. "Always they are just preliminary decisions that will be addressed again later anyway. It's totally confusing to the public, and even to ourselves."
"The shift. in campaign financing toward direct mail and PACS has an obverse effect that is often overlooked: the shift away from political-party structures as a source of funds.... "Today, if you can't sell an issue in twenty seconds, you can't use it," Representative Synar says. "It only takes twenty seconds to say 'Your congressman is against prayer.' It takes me five minutes to explain why that's wrong. But television won't give me five minutes."
his raises the issue of whether more useful work is done on the floor or in committee. We don't know and perhaps the members of Congress don't know. But it does illustrate that most Congressmen have to spend otherwise useful time in covering their backsides.
Budget Woes
Much of Easterbrook's article deals with the budget. That's proper since the budget is a prime Constitutional role for Congress. Here are some examples and thoughts about the budget process:
"Before 1974 the House and Senate each had three kinds of committees involved with the budget: authorizing, appropriating, and revenue. The authorizing committees, like Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, and Interior, are the most familiar; they "authorize" federal activity by writing legislation in their subject areas. But though they can start or end programs, they cannot approve expenditures--only the two appropriating committees can do that. Since the amount spent on a program usually determines that program's effect on policy, the potential for overlapping and disputation is boundless. Neither authorizing nor appropriating committees, meanwhile, have the power to raise the money that backs up the checks--only the Finance Committee, in the Senate, and the Ways and Means Committee, in the House, do. Because of this separation it became all too easy for authorizing and appropriating committees to ignore the fiscal consequences of their actions--getting the money was somebody's else's job--and for the revenue committees, in turn, to demand that the other fellow crack down on spending." (Emphasis is mine.)
"The budget process was intended to bring together the questions of how much to spend, how to spend it, and where the funds would come from with a single resolution that would both guide Congress and impose a series of spending ceilings to control the deficit. ...Ideally this would have been accomplished through some merging of the authorizing, appropriating, and revenue committees. But merger would have required that at least two powerful chairmen, plus many subcommittee chairmen, surrender their posts. So an entirely new procedural tier, the budget committees, complete with two important new chairmanships, was set on top."
"Because of the regularity with which redundant floor votes occur, Congress "never finishes anything, never arrives at a decision," according to Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska. "Always they are just preliminary decisions that will be addressed again later anyway. It's totally confusing to the public, and even to ourselves.""
"Often in recent years the United States has technically not had a budget at all but rather has operated under a "continuing resolution" that keeps the money flowing but avoids an official legislative confrontation over the deficit. Continuing resolutions are popular, in part because they are one of the mechanisms that allow congressmen to seem to be voting for both sides at once: they can vote No on the budget itself ("I'm opposed to these deficits") and vote Yes for individual programs on the continuing resolution ("I brought increased federal spending to this district"). Similarly, the frequent votes to raise the federal debt ceiling are technically "temporary" legislation, so that congressmen can claim that each vote was merely for an emergency stopgap, not an endorsement of the debt itself."
"In recent years there also has been an increase in the use of supplemental appropriations bills, which are in effect end runs around the stagnated budget process."
"A noncontroversial philanthropic bill--who could be against food for drought victims and summer jobs for youth?--was ideal as a carrier of baggage. Within ten days the Senate had attached no fewer than thirty-five more riders to the bill."
Summary
think this article is a good introduction and summary of why we never get a balanced budget, why it takes so long to settle on any kind of budget, and how the confusion allows unnamed members to tack on earmarks and supplementals that drive the budget into red. Clearly Congress needs to change their budget procedures.
The main points are:
- The budget process is unworkable
- budget approved after expenditures begin
- Neither Members of Congress or the voter have any idea of where any part of the budget stands at any time
- The budget process allows Members of Congress to evade responsibility
- Authors of additions to the budget not often identifiable
- Too many committees and subcommittees. They overlap and allow a Member of Congress to increase spending in one committee and then claim fiscal responsibility in another committee
- The budget process does not promote a balanced budget, nor does it facilitate reducing the deficit.
0 comments:
Post a Comment