How Republicans can break the spending habit.
BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
"What do you suppose [they] are in the Congress for, if it ain't to split up the swag?"--Will Rogers
Splitting up the swag ("booty, money, valuables") seems to be what the congressional Republican Party is about.
The Heritage Foundation reported last week that this sixth year of a Republican Presidency and Congress will see government expenditures of $23,760 per household--$6,500 more than when they came to power in 2001 and the highest inflation-adjusted annual spending since World War II. Excluding homeland security, domestic discretionary spending has increased 7.6% per year. Education spending is up 139%; energy spending has doubled, and the Bush Medicare prescription drug bill will add $33 billion a year to federal expenditures.
A Republican House enacted all this spending, a Republican Senate approved almost all of it (Democrats did control the upper chamber for a little under two years in 2001-02), and a Republican president signed it all. Congress has appropriated a cumulative $350 billion more than the president requested in his annual budgets, but none of that additional spending was disapproved by him--indeed, President Bush is the only president since John Quincy Adams (1825-29) never to use his veto power in a full term in office.
One political truth is that when legislators see elected executives taking no action to control spending, they spend and spend. Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the Budget Committee chairman, notes that "emergency spending"--which is not controlled by budget or other spending rules--averaged $22 billion a year in the 1990s and is now up to $100 billion a year. Last year 13,997 earmarks--money for hometown handouts--totaling $27 billion, were approved by Congress. In this year's House budget bill there are 9,963 of them costing $29 billion. The House Appropriations Committee chairman, Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, pulled the bill from a floor vote when conservative Republicans demanded that votes be allowed on each earmark. But it will be back, and likely passed without amendment.
Last week's Specter swag grab--a $7 billion addition to domestic spending through an appropriations subcommittee that Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter chairs--was an addition that the senator says was "not sort of a gimmick; it is a gimmick." It was supported by every Democrat and a majority of the 55 Republican senators, which led Sen. Specter to conclude that the Republican party of the 21st Century is "now principally moderate, if not liberal."
Mr. Specter is pretty much on the mark about the Washington world, but he's dead wrong about America's Republicans. The national majority are neither moderate nor liberal but believe in conservative economic values: lower tax rates, controlled spending, and a market- as opposed to government-oriented economy. It is not Republicans who are liberal, it is the current Republican government that is fiscally liberal and the biggest budget-busting federal spenders since the 1960s.
So how can Republicans get their identity back? The current Congress is unlikely to fix itself from the inside--would a Congressional majority ever want to give up authority to do anything?--so it will be up to the American people to fix it from the outside.
First, the president must be persuaded to reduce congressional spending. He must use his rescission authority to force the Congress to vote on rescinding some $15 billion, about the average of what presidents have requested since the rescission process began in the 1970s. The president has proposed one rescission of $2.3 billion, but he must be far more aggressive.
Second, when Congress enacts legislation exceeding the president's requested budget spending levels, he should veto those spending bills. Legislators need to be forcefully reminded that spending requires executive as well as legislative approval.
Third, the president needs line-item veto authority. Most of the states governors have it and use it to control spending, and so should the President. When President Bush recently suggested a line-item veto, Mr. Lewis said the legislative branch of government had the spending power and to give any veto power to the president "could be a very serious error." But the opposite is the case: the line-item veto is a very serious improvement that the president and Republicans should pursue.
Next, Congress needs to clean up its earmark spending process. As a start it should adopt the proposal from Rep. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) that each earmark's sponsor be identified in the text of spending bills, and that a vote be allowed on specific earmark proposals. Congress should also establish term limits for Appropriations Committee members so that the congressional political establishment cannot go on swag-splitting forever.
Then comes the hard part--the long-term solution of a constitutional amendment to control the Congressional spending process. Republicans should launch a constitutional balanced budget amendment effort as they did in 1982, when 32 states (two short of the 34 required) petitioned Congress for a constitutional convention to consider one; the U.S. Senate approved an amendment with the required two-thirds majority; and it failed in the House by 46 votes. There are several substantive choices--the Colorado Taxpayers Bill of Rights that limits spending to inflation plus population growth (with any additional revenue being refunded to the taxpayers) is one; another is the Delaware constitutional requirement that there be a three-fifths vote of the Legislature to approve spending more than 98% of revenue. A constitutional amendment requiring a supermajority congressional vote for spending in excess of revenues would be a substantial step forward.
Finally, there are two alternatives other than expenditure control that would change congressional spending habits. The first is the flat tax. Congress uses our current tax code's 66,000-page complexity to reward some constituents with lower rates and higher deductions, and punish others with the opposite. The flat tax would eliminate such political manipulation, raise government revenues, and save taxpayers much of the $150 billion and six million hours it costs Americans to comply with the current tax code.
Then there is the McCain-Feingold campaign spending law, a significant incumbent-protection device. It violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech by limiting an individual's right to spend money to elect people he believes in. That makes it much easier for incumbents to get re-elected, no doubt why Congress is so eager to continue expanding its limitations on campaign spending. Repealing it would strengthen freedom of speech, increase congressional turnover, and reduce the seniority monopoly that has enacted the $350 billion in excessive spending.
None of these changes will be easy to accomplish, but a paradigm shift is needed to control spending excesses and restore the economic conservatism that has long been the core of the Republican Party's election victories. The White House has fresh staff leadership this week in Josh Bolten, a good time to begin changing its spending habits. Otherwise the next two elections are going to be the worst of times.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.
opinionjournal.com |
