Irregular Order Comes Back
The WasteWatcher
When Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, it established a topline discretionary spending budget, formally known as the 302(a) allocation, for fiscal years (FY) 2014 and 2015. Although there were several negative aspects of the budget compromise, many of which Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) pointed out to members of Congress before they voted on the bill, one of the positive aspects was that it marked the first time since April 29, 2009 that Congress had passed a budget and set the stage for a return to regular order. Unfortunately, as Congress prepares to embark on a five-week legislative recess, it is certain that a normal budget process will not occur this year.
As CAGW laid out in a November 3, 2013 WasteWatcher article, “The 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act established the current federal budget process, which requires that Congress annually adopt a budget resolution to set the funding levels for the federal government. Since there are normally differences between the budgets passed by the House and Senate, the two chambers are supposed to go to conference to negotiate a budget by April 15 of each year that is capable of achieving enough support to become law.”
However, since the Bipartisan Budget Act marked the first time that Congress had agreed to a budget resolution in nearly five years, the government had been relying on continuing resolutions (CR), which extend funding for federal programs, usually at the prior fiscal year’s levels. CRs can range in length from a few months to almost an entire fiscal year. Due to a variety of factors, including political stalemate, ineptitude, and abdication of one of Congress’s most basic duties, another short-term CR is coming.
Members of the House of Representatives, to their credit, have made much more progress in enacting the FY 2015 annual appropriations bills than their Senate counterparts. As of July 30, 2014, the House has passed five bills, while the Senate has yet to pass a single one. Although Senate indolence has become commonplace over the past several years, it should not go without rebuke. Procedural gimmicks by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), such as limiting the amount of amendments that can be offered by “filling the amendment tree,” have led to legislative gridlock in the chamber.
An April 8, 2014 article in National Journal Daily explained this practice: “Essentially, the ‘tree’ represents all the amendments that are included in a particular bill; up to 11 are accepted. Of late, the Democratic majority has taken to ‘filling the tree’ on major pieces of legislation, leaving no room for Republican proposals. Many of these Democratic proposals are filler, making infinitesimal changes to bills that often don't end up becoming law anyway. The bulk of them are second-degree amendments, which is to say, amendments of amendments. When one falls, the others topple like dominoes. But that's typically reserved for the last minute, leaving Republicans no time to replace them with their own.”
Since 302(a) allocations were established before the start of the calendar year, members of Congress cannot claim that they did not have time to perform their “normal” business, and that another CR was the only viable budgetary option. The nation’s $17.6 trillion debt cannot be adequately addressed through ad-hoc budgeting procedures. If members of Congress truly want to improve their abysmal 15 percent approval rating, they should return to regular order for the entire budget and appropriations process.
- P.J. Austin