March 16, 2006
"JOINT BUDGET RESOLUTION" COULD LEAD TO GRIDLOCK ON APPROPRIATIONS AND SHIFT POWER TO THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH
By Richard Kogan and James Horney
Under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974,
budget resolutions are “concurrent resolutions” that do not go to the President
for his signature or veto and are not laws. Also under current rules, if a
budget resolution has not been approved by May 15, appropriations bills may be
brought to the House floor so that the appropriations process is not
inordinately delayed.
The Republican Study Committee, a group of
conservative members of the House of Representatives, has called for converting
the concurrent budget resolution into a joint budget resolution that is signed
by the President and has the force of law.[1]
As specified in H.R. 2290, introduced by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), this
proposal would bar consideration of appropriations bills until the joint budget
resolution is enacted, regardless of how many months it takes for the Senate,
the House, and the President to reach agreement on the resolution. The
President and Congress would have to work out agreement on a budget law before
passing any appropriations bills or, for that matter, taking up any other
legislation that has any budgetary impact. The proposal to convert the
Congressional budget resolution into a joint resolution may (or may not) be
included in budget process legislation that the House Republican leadership has
pledged to bring to the House floor in coming weeks.
This proposal raises several serious
concerns.
Delays in the Budget Process
The process of developing a Congressional budget
resolution already can be long and tedious, with budget deadlines being missed;
it can take time to work out agreement between the House and Senate.
Requiring the agreement of the President as well would almost certainly make the
process more difficult and protracted.
In years in which the President and Congress
were in serious disagreement on the budget, those disagreements might well not
be resolved until the waning days of the Congressional session. As a result, if
a joint budget resolution were required, action on appropriations bills could be
held up until the final days of a Congressional session. In years in which
budget agreements were delayed, the Appropriations Committees could lose months
of valuable time and find themselves under intense pressure to assemble and pass
bills in extremely compressed timeframes very late in the year.
It is sometimes argued that a joint budget
resolution will improve budget outcomes by bringing the President into
negotiations with Congress over the entire budget. To be sure, much of the
work to reduce projected deficits in the 1980’s and 1990’s occurred when the
President and Congress hammered out major budget deals — in 1983, 1990, 1993,
and (to a lesser extent) 1997. But these experiences show that when the
President and Congress share a desire to reduce the deficit, a joint budget
resolution is not needed to bring them to the negotiating table. And in
years when Congress and the President do not share a strong desire to produce
major deficit-reduction legislation, requiring enactment of a joint budget
resolution is likely to slow down the budget process.
Aggravating these problems, the proposal does not
provide a “fallback” if the President vetoed the budget resolution and Congress
could not override the veto. Some Members of Congress have previously
introduced joint budget resolution proposals that included a proviso that if the
President vetoed the budget resolution and Congress did not override the veto,
the vetoed resolution would go into effect as a concurrent resolution (i.e., as
a resolution that functions as budget resolutions do today), so Congress would
not be left with entirely without a budget. The joint budget resolution
proposal included in H.R. 2290 and endorsed by the Republican Study Committee
does not include this proviso and contains no safety valve in the event of a
veto that is not overridden. Such a proposal would shift substantial power
from Congress to the Executive Branch, since Congress could not act on budgetary
matters until the President agreed to sign the budget resolution. This
would markedly increase the likelihood of protracted gridlock.
Slippery Slope to Parliamentary Budgeting
The proposal also poses another risk. The
joint resolution is not itself supposed to change tax, entitlement, or
appropriations laws. But once the President and the Leadership find themselves
negotiating over a real statute rather than a budget planning document, they may
succumb to the temptation to turn the joint budget resolution into an omnibus
law, enacting discretionary caps or actual appropriations levels, cutting or
expanding entitlement programs, and raising or lowering taxes. If this happens,
basic budget rules could be up for debate and amendment annually, budget
outcomes may become more partisan (if one party has control of both the
Presidency and Congress), “headline” proposals may rob resources from less
glamorous but equally necessary program areas, and Congress may function more as
a parliament, in which a single vote on a single piece of legislation enacts
into law the majority party’s budget.
If the annual budget resolution gradually turns
into an annual omnibus budget bill, power over major budgetary details will slip
from the various Congressional committees and gravitate toward the Budget
Committee, the Leadership, and especially the President.
End Notes:
[1] See Republican Study Committee,
“RSC FY 2007 Budget, Contract With America Renewed,” March 8, 2006, p. 72.
http://www.house.gov/pence/rsc/doc/RSC_2007_BUDGET.pdf
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