Here we go. Again.
In October of 2013 the satirical news site, The Onion, ran a piece entitled “Heroic
Broken Sewage Pipe Floods Congress With Human Waste.” [1]
“Calling the busted cylinder a national hero,” the article read, “sources
confirmed Wednesday that a sewer pipe in the U.S. Capitol building valiantly
burst open, pouring more than 1.5 million gallons of raw sewage into Congress
and flooding the Senate and House of Representatives with human excrement,
sludge, and wastewater.” A picture ran with the article depicting members of
Congress covered with filth.
Where the fault should lie for the inability of Congress to
pass a budget by the deadline, thus causing much of the federal government to officially
shut down [2],
will be answered only in a partisan manner. But the new age abhorrence of
compromise has made it impossible for the national legislature to function
properly, and that should be perfectly clear to all.
Political parties too have once again revealed themselves as
the public nuisances they truly are. Instead of going about the business of
governance, congressional partisans engage each other in a game of chicken,
planning in advance how they will blame the other party in the event that no
one swerves out of the way in time. With their usual uncharitable assessment of
the intelligence of the average American, they hope no one will notice that interparty
mudslinging takes priority over all other concerns. (Why we are surprised when
politicians continue to behave like politicians once they are in office is a
subject we should take up sometime.)
Many changes can be contemplated above and beyond pleading
with politicians to change their behavior, but until such visions are instantiated
we have to play in the ballpark we’re in. So we ask ourselves what we can do,
within the framework of the Constitution, about the fact that Congress seems to
find it overly difficult to pass a budget. And the answer might be that they
should stop trying.
The president didn’t have to submit an annual budget for the
whole federal government before the enactment of the Budgeting and Accounting
Act of 1921. [3]
The Constitution doesn’t require it. All it does require is that all “Bills for
raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate
may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills,” (Article I, Sec. 7) and that no “Money shall be drawn from the Treasury,
but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and
Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published
from time to time.” (Article I, Sec. 9)
Getting rid of the budgeting process as it is now practiced,
while it may seem to be irresponsible at first blush, would actually force
Congress to look at line items on a more individualized basis. Since we could
expect that appropriations would accompany these line items, a process of the
kind being suggested here might even engender a heightened awareness of
expenditures not derived from the treasury. This is not to say that deficits
necessarily portend the disaster advertised, but it could not be harmful to
enhance the consciousness of our senators and representatives.
But the greatest benefit to such an approach would be to
eliminate all of the deadlines and government shutdowns. A dispute over one or
two items wouldn’t require the federal government to close for business.
Or perhaps we’ll just have to call upon the intrepid sewage
pipe.