Republicans are starting to get antsy re the run up in spending across the board, and some are even accusing the President and congress of spending like a drunken sailor".
What happened to all that congressional spending control legislation passed some time ago that was supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening? Did they rescind it?
There was no spending control passed by the United States Congress of which I am aware. At least none that the Congress has not been able to find ways to get around.
There have been attempts to get a ‘balanced budget’ amendment to the Constitution, but they have all failed.
The best legislation ever passed by Congress to control spending was the ‘Line Item Veto’ (signed by President Bill Clinton) but that was deemed unconsitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Otherwise, any and all attempts to control spending by the Congress must be done by Congress. The Constitution gives sole responsibility for spending to them.
The only potential control over Congress at this time is the Presidential veto. Without the line item veto, this means completely rejecting a spending bill until the pork is removed (or Congress musters a 2/3 majority to override it). There was some hope the Bush would exercise this option but events since his election seem to have changed his priorities.
This option was used to some effect by Reagan who, if I recall, vetoed a number of spending bills which were subsequently trimmed down.
No, the “Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985”, a.k.a. “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings”, is still in effect. Congress just waives it every time they want to spend money.
It would take someone far more learned than myself to explain all the nuances of G-R-H, and how Congress votes its way around it. For a brief introduction, see this summary of rules governing appropriations bills in the House of Representatives.
Two points of order, at least one of which concerned G-R-H, were “waived” by identical 225-205 votes before the House approved the recent Medicare prescription drug expansion.
The problem with all statutory and rule-based restraints on spending, of course, is that they can be overridden by majority vote. Barring a constitutional amendment, when a majority of each house of Congress and the president want to spend money, they can.
Short term deficits are generally believed to have certain benefits during a recession. So it is not surprising that spending caps would disappear during the 2001 - ??? recession/growth recession.
(The record surpluses of the Clinton years also, ironically enough, lessened the perceived urgency of continued fiscal discipline.)
According to the Concord coalition:
“The Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (BEA) established caps on discretionary spending, and a pay-as-you-go limitation on entitlements spending and tax cuts… The statutory enforcement mechanism of the 1990 BEA has now expired.”
From the pdf file: http://www.concordcoalition.org/federal_budget/030319tencriteria.pdf , last page
As Senator Everett Dirksen (R, IL) once said, “Ho, Ho, Ho,” and I might add, “Ha, Ha, Ha.”
There are other legislative procedures that have been used to limit spending, even in this session of Congress. Let me give you just two examples. Bear with me, because this does get very complicated very quickly.
Each spring, Congress is supposed to pass a budget resolution, which lays out the general spending plan for the next year. (I’m ignoring out-year spending for the sake of simplicity, for those who might want to pick nits.) A budget resolution is like a blueprint – it doesn’t actually spend money, it just kind of lays out priorities, like that the government should spend $785 billion for all discretionary programs in 2004.
When the House and Senate debate the budget resolution, as a rule of thumb, you can anticipate that Democrats will try to increase spending, and Republicans will seek to decrease taxes (lower revenue). The Senate has a standing rule known as the Byrd Rule that makes it more difficult to include unrestrained spending increases or reckless revenue reductions (tax cuts), by subjecting those provisions to a 60-vote point of order. So that rule, more or less, deals with trying to make the budget resolution an instrument to cutting deficits (by limiting growth in entitlements and reduction of taxes).
As the 13 annual appropriations bills are considered later in the year, they must conform to the budget resolution – that is, they are expected to contain no more than $785 billion in discretionary spending (per the budget resolution). If a bill violates that budget cap, a point of order can kill provisions that increase spending beyond what was anticipated. That point of order may only be waived by 60 votes. The only exception to this is that emergency spending on national defense is subject to a 51-vote point of order.
There were countless partisan amendments voted down in the Senate this year that would have increased spending even further, but the requirement for 60 votes to waive the budget rules effectively killed those amendments.
[mixing apples and oranges] You may have heard that the Medicare bill came within one vote of being killed on a budget point of order. Budget-hawk critics of the bill called it too expensive, and since the bill spent more than was anticipated in the budget resolution, Senators had to muster 60 votes to kill that point of order. (Clarification - here I refer to mandatory spending, as opposed to appropriated (discretionary) spending)[/maao]
So, there are still methods used by Congress for limiting spending. But lets be frank - despite McCain’s obsesssion with pork, the current budget deficits are much more attributable to a soft economy than runaway spending.