Boxing Day, 2022 The final act of the 117th Read Nothing Congress was to provide the American public with a $1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill. That bill was obscene, overstuffed and outrageous, reflecting many of the horrors that pass for governing these days. $858 billion went for defence on the quaint and long-outdated notion that more spending will produce a stronger military-which it will not. And the remaining $800 billion and change also included non-fiscal items ranging from finally correcting the ambiguities of the 1887 Electoral Count Act that led to the January 6th storming of the Capitol to the equally important approval of allowing service academy graduates to play professional football before fulfilling active duty commitments.
Where to start? First, about 200 members skulked out of town to celebrate the holidays early, voting by proxy. The remaining House members finally approved the bill Friday to avoid the once-in-a-generation storm that would freeze much of the nation. Proxy voting is fine in an emergency such as Covid. However, it reinforced perhaps one of the most profane and profound criticisms of the so-called legislative process.
No one, repeat no one had read the entire 4155-page Omnibus bill before voting on it. How could they? Depending on the translation, that is equivalent to reading the whole of “War and Peace” five or six times in a single night. As a veteran of the Capitol Hill Wars mumbled decades ago, “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.” That is outrageous.
But in a government that is failing to carry out its duties, rolling the separate twelve appropriations bills into one makes perfect perverted common sense. Not passing the Omnibus bill would have forced a government shutdown. That threat provided perfect cover for senators and representatives to vote on items safely and without accountability that they fundamentally opposed. “I had no choice” is the lame response.
Why should members of the elected branch be held less accountable than the CEOs of public companies?
Since the filibuster requires sixty votes to pass controversial legislation, how else could serious business get done in a Senate divided 50-50 outside the extraordinary reconciliation process? Yes, the 117th Congress did pass a large number of laws and spending bills. But the only way to get a budget approved was through this obscene and irresponsible process that is the antithesis of good governance.
In considering the budget, Congress has adopted, yes adopted, a Frankensteinian three-part process of budgeting, authorizing and appropriating. One cynical reason is that with 535 members of Congress, a large number of committees and sub-committees are vital so that each member can be seen by constituents as holding important assignments. Budgeting sets the overall budget limits that invariably are broken.
Then authorizers propose how much money should go from the treasury to specific programs. Finally, the appropriators approve the spending that allows the authorizers’ checks to be cashed. No wonder budgets are rarely passed on time or are balanced. And the stop-gap measures of concurrent resolutions to keep the government solvent are hugely inefficient, freezing spending at prior year levels and giving little or no flexibility to the Executive Branch’s departments in planning and paying for both mandatory and discretionary programs.
For the Defense Department, for example, each day under a concurrent resolution probably wastes more than $500 million in inefficiency. And other departments are similarly affected. This is no way to run a serious government.
What can be done? The real solution is so obvious and commonsensical that it will never be considered. Each member, before voting on a bill, must swear or affirm that he or she had read and understands the pending legislation.
Members would be aghast. How can they be expected to read and understand bills on which they will vote on such short notice? That would be bureaucratically and physically impossible.
A little bit of history is valuable. When Donald Rumsfeld first became Defense Secretary in 1975, the Defense Appropriations Bill was less than 100 pages long. And that was when the US was ending the war in Vietnam. Today, the defence bills are at least ten times longer. Why?
Next, why should members of the elected branch be held less accountable than, for example, the CEOs of public companies? After the corporate scandals of the early 2000s, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley law that imposed stiff penalties for corporate officers who did not file public reports that were accurate and so declared. Why should Congress not be held to the same standard? Perhaps that is one New Years’ Resolution Congress must consider and approve. But it won’t.
The writer is a senior advisor at Washington, DC’s Atlantic Council and a published author.