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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Requiem for a Budget Resolution
The high-water mark of the budget-making process in 2007 may have been Congress' adoption of a budget resolution, a worthy accomplishment rarely achieved in recent years, but hardly a substitute for regular order enactment of appropriations bills pursuant to it.
Why was Congress unable to build on its budget resolution this year, why was it left to whither on the vine? Stan Collander, in A Review Of 2007 offers a cogent explanation:
A budget resolution is a unique kind of legislation; it can't be filibustered in the Senate and doesn't have to be signed by the president, so it is not subject to a veto. As a result, only a simple majority was needed to put the budget resolution in place... Every other budget-related bill needed more than 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a seemingly inevitable filibuster. With congressional Republicans determined not to allow anything to happen that could be considered an accomplishment, gathering the necessary votes became impossible.
Blame cannot be affixed solely on Congress. While leadership was lacking there, the booby prize for fiscal irresonpsibility must be conferred upon the President, expositor-in-chief of the deficits-don't-matter theory. Again, Stan:
The Bush White House continued its policy of talking as little as possible about fiscal policy, the deficit and the national debt, and congressional Democrats had no consistent spokesperson on the budget. As a result, the issue was so in the background in 2007 that there was virtually no mention of the $50 billion to $60 billion increase in the deficit that will occur if there is no PAYGO offset to the one-year alternative minimum tax fix.
The president insisted the AMT fix should not be offset, but never mentioned that the deficit, federal borrowing and annual interest payments would all be higher if his position prevailed. Congress failed to point out the fiscal irresponsibility of the president's position, possibly because lawmakers realized that, without the votes to override a veto, they would likely have to approve the AMT fix without an offset as well.
And in so doing, Congress became a willing co-conspirator in the violation of its own resolution, its one crowning achievement in budget policy this year.
Posted by Dana Chasin
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