Reconcilable Differences?: Congress, the Budget Process, and the Deficit - Hardcover

Gilmour, John B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520067789 ISBN 13: 9780520067783

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 1990

Inhaltsangabe

Gilmour traces the development of the congressional budget process from its origin through the emergence of reconcilliation and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings. He shows how changes in process have brought about far-reaching shifts in congressional power, and explains why they have failed to control the explosion of budget deficits.

Throughout the last decade budgetary issues have dominated the national political agenda as the deficit has skyrocketed to previously unimaginable levels. In this important book, John Gilmour traces the continuing quest of Congress over the last fifteen years to reform its budgeting system in the hope of producing better policy. He shows that the enactment of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and the introduction of the reconciliation procedure in 1980 have produced a budgetary system in which congressional majorities can get what they want, provided only that they can agree on a comprehensive budget policy. From his thorough analysis, Gilmour concludes that, while the reforms have not produced balanced budgets, they have eliminated procedural obstructions to the adoption of a coherent budget.

New budget procedures have transformed the way Congress works. Before the reforms of 1974 and 1980, Congress had an extremely fragmented, disintegrated budgetary system in which the budget emerged almost haphazardly from the independent actions of numerous committees. Gilmour shows that reconciliation procedures in the budget process makes total revenue, total expenditures, and the size of the deficit matters of deliberate choice, consolidating decisionmaking to an extent unprecedented in the history of the modern Congress.

Yet, despite the striking structural and procedural changes, and despite its highly majoritarian features, the budget process has failed to reduce dissatisfaction with congressional handling of money. Deficits have been larger, not smaller, and overall spending has gone up. Gilmour deftly shows that the massive budget deficits of the Reagan years were due primarily to the failure of the House, the Senate, and the President to agree on how to reduce spending or increase taxes enough to eliminate the deficit. Responsibility for budgetary failure, he argues, must rest with Congress and its inability to reach consensus, not on the new budget process, which, given what we can expect from procedural change, has been quite successful.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John B. Gilmour is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University.

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Reconcilable Differences? Congress, the Budget Process, and the Deficit

By John Gilmour

University of California Press

Copyright © 1990 John Gilmour
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520067789


Introduction

In its dealings with budgetary issues since 1980, Congress has acted uncharacteristically, upsetting longstanding expectations and contradicting contemporary theories of congressional behavior. Members of Congress are seekers of reelection, we are told, and the quest to retain their offices leads them to decentralize the organization of Congress because, through their work in committees, representatives can best engage in the activities most likely to get them reelected. In policy making we have come to expect Congress and its members to favor legislation that confers tangible benefits upon constituents and districts, while scrupulously avoiding choices that impose costs or hardships directly upon constituents.

Despite these widespread expectations, members of Congress have undermined their committee system by developing an overarching, all-encompassing budget process that allows congressional majorities to exercise an unprecedented degree of control over committees. Moreover, since 1980 Congress has come to rely on budgetary negotiations and decision making that take place largely or entirely outside the normal committee structure of Congress. In some cases the budget process has

enabled congressional floor majorities to adopt comprehensive budgets on the floor and to enforce their preferences on reluctant committees. In other cases party leadership and committee chairs have agreed on the general outlines of budget policy and used the budget process as a means of implementing these group decisions. Either way, the budget process disrupts the ordinary sequence of the legislative process. Normally the committees go first, determining their own agenda and presenting legislative proposals to the rest of the chamber. Under the new budget process entities outside committees—whether gatherings of committee chairs, summit meetings, or committed majorities—effectively can set the agenda for committees and direct them to draft spending resolutions or tax increases.

Two episodes from recent history suggest the nature of the new budgetary order in Congress. First, in 1981, the initial year of the Reagan presidency, a unanimous Republican party in the House was joined by a substantial number of "boll weevil" Democrats; they succeeded in enacting the president's budget recommendations in their entirety, despite the objections of committees with jurisdictions over programs and despite the best efforts of the majority party leadership to thwart the administration's budget proposals. Republicans were able to achieve this remarkable feat only because of the budget process, particularly the new "reconciliation" procedure, which enormously consolidates congressional procedure and reduces the influence of committees.

Second, spurred on by the Black Monday stock market crash of October 19, 1987, in which the Dow Jones average fell by more than 500 points in one day, Democrats and Republicans of both the House and the Senate met with leaders from the administration and negotiated

a package of deficit reductions worth some $30 billion. Committees in both chambers then proceeded to draft legislation implementing the decisions reached in the interbranch "summit" meetings. Such summit meetings, almost commonplace in the 1980s, were basically nonexistent before 1980. The initiation of reconciliation is linked with that of interbranch budgetary negotiations: reconciliation allows committed floor majorities to impose their will on committees, making it possible to enforce negotiated agreements. Without an enforcement device, it makes little sense to negotiate agreements.

These developments contrast starkly with Woodrow Wilson's classic discussion of Congress. A century ago, Wilson asserted that Congress conducts its "business by what may figuratively, but not inaccurately, be described as an odd device of disintegration ." In Wilson's view, Congress qualified as "disintegrated' because its work was conducted by the parts—the committees—and not the whole. "Congress in session," he continued, "is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work." Furthermore, he wrote, "the chairmen of the Standing Committees do not constitute a cooperative body like a ministry. They do not consult and concur in the adoption of homogeneous and mutually helpful measures; there is no thought of acting in concert. Each committee goes its own way at its own pace."1 Subsequent observers have seen little to cause them to disagree with Wilson's assessment. Innumerable observers of Congress have found it to be a committee-centered body in which negotiations are conducted in committee and important

Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973), chap. 2, pp. 57–98.

decisions are not made on the floor. Authors often condemn the fragmented structure of Congress; sometimes they applaud it, and occasionally they are even ambivalent. But whatever view they take of fragmentation and committee autonomy, they do not dispute their existence.

There has also been common agreement on congressional policy-making tendencies. At least since Schattschneider wrote about the politics of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, scholars have contended that Congress favors narrow, assertive interests, over broader, less well-mobilized interests.2 This tendency manifests itself in the congressional enthusiasm for water projects and public works,3 agriculture subsidies, food stamps,4 merchant marine subsidies, tariffs,5 tax exclusions,6 veterans' benefits, and Social Security.7

But in 1980, an election year, Congress did the unthinkable when it voted to increase taxes and cut spending. In 1981 Congress passed the largest spending cut ever enacted. In 1982 Congress defied conventional wisdom

E. E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressure, and the Tariff (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1935).

John A. Ferejohn, Pork-Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

John A. Ferejohn, "Logrolling in an Institutional Context: A Case Study of Food Stamp Legislation," in Congress and Policy Change , ed. Gerald Wright, Leroy Rieselbach, and Lawrence Dodd (New York: Agathon Press, 1986), pp. 223–253.

Schattschneider, Politics, Pressure, and the Tariff.

Stanley Surrey, "How Special Tax Provisions Get Enacted," Harvard Law Review 70 (1957): 1145–1182. Of course, the tax reform of 1986 suggests that tax politics is not necessarily controlled by those seeking tax expenditures. But the story of the 1986 tax bill fully confirms the view that members of Congress cater to special interests. Jeffrey Birnbaum and Allan Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch (New York: Random House, 1987).

Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1979).

when it cut spending and enacted the largest tax increase in history. Normally we expect Congress to pass difficult legislation only with presidential support, but in passing the 1982 tax bill, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, Congress and the president reversed roles, as the legislative branch persuaded an otherwise reluctant...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1990
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520067789
• ISBN 13: 9780520067783
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar