How Government Is Supposed to Work

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

There is a predictable — and, to some extent, intentional — pile-up happening in Washington, an ugly and loud collision of big spending proposals, a bill to raise the debt ceiling, and a bill to fund the regular operations of government and avoid a federal shutdown. There are many reasons for this mess, and one of the most important of them is that our dysfunctional Congress is incapable of following its own rules.

 

People’s eyes tend to glaze over when you start talking about congressional procedure and “regular order,” but, bear with me.

 

We have a way to improve the appropriations process, and that way is — this part should be obvious! — the appropriations process. But it has been a long time since Congress has stuck to its own spending procedures.

 

Here is how this is supposed to work.

 

First, there is a “budget resolution.” This is a nonbinding policy statement that Congress adopts after a good bit of internal negotiation and some pro forma negotiation with the White House. The president does not actually have much to do with taxing or spending, which is why it always has been nonsensical to talk about the “Reagan deficit” or the “Clinton surplus.” We had Tip O’Neill deficits and, on paper, at least, a Newt Gingrich surplus. The point here is not a partisan one — the point is that budgetary power, and budgetary responsibility, lie with Congress.

 

Second, there is the real appropriations process. The budget resolution says what Congress would like to spend, in a perfect world. The appropriations process determines what Congress is actually going to spend (sort of — more on that in a second). Under “regular order,” spending bills originate in the House, which has an Appropriations Committee and, more important, a dozen or so appropriations subcommittees. Under “regular order,” each of those subcommittees produces a spending bill covering its particular area of responsibility: “Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies,” “Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies,” “Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies,” etc.

 

It is in these subcommittees that spending priorities are supposed to be set. And if you are looking for a place to manage infrastructure spending, this is it. The subcommittee system is far from perfect, but the full-time members of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies have a better shot at making intelligent and responsible decisions about energy infrastructure than does Congress as a whole — especially when those energy-infrastructure decisions are lumped in with literally everything else Congress appropriates money for.

 

Under regular order, we would have twelve (or so; the number has varied) appropriations bills to be considered, debated, and amended individually, instead of one big bill covering all or practically all discretionary spending.

 

Which brings us to a caveat mentioned above: Most federal spending today is not discretionary spending, which is to say, it is not spending that Congress has to authorize through the appropriations process. The majority of federal spending, about two-thirds of it, is so-called mandatory spending — things such as Social Security and other entitlements that keep chugging on irrespective of what Congress does or does not do in the budget process. So, keep this in mind: When you hear about all those trillions of dollars in play, that’s only a small part of overall spending.

 

But it is not an insignificant part.

 

The instruments that have supplanted regular order are so-called omnibus spending bills — one big spending bill instead of twelve smaller, more manageable ones — and the process known as “budget reconciliation.” Reconciliation is mainly of interest to the Senate, because it allows taxing and spending bills to move on a special track that is not subject to filibuster and that limits the number and kind of amendments that can be put forward to bog down the process. The omnibus model has obvious problems, the main one being that it forces the Nancy Pelosi mentality — “We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it!” — on everything Congress does. The reconciliation process has proved vulnerable to procedural gamesmanship, and, though it was adopted in the hope that it would help to reduce deficits, it has proved as likely to do the opposite in practice.

 

The main obstacle to returning to “regular order” is what I call “procedural maximalism.” Procedural maximalism is the habit of exploiting every parliamentary constraint and every legislative choke-point to the greatest possible extent, sacrificing the long-term credibility and effectiveness of Congress to short-term political interests. Put simply, an omnibus spending bill creates one opportunity for a high-stakes filibuster, whereas regular order would create a dozen opportunities for slightly lower-stakes filibusters. If we could rely on senators to show some restraint and resort to filibusters only in fights of real consequence, that would not be a problem. But we have the senators we have.

 

One possible reform would be exempting appropriations bills adopted through regular order from the filibuster. The filibuster gets a bad rap, sometimes undeservedly: The antidemocratic character of the Senate is by design and is a critical part of our constitutional architecture to the extent that it allows the Senate to act as a brake on demagoguery originating in the House and, increasingly, in the White House. That is something that we should preserve if possible. But the filibuster also creates opportunities for demagoguery in the Senate. It is one more lever — a big one — in the machinery of procedural maximalism.

 

Good government is boring government. Disorder, drama, and cathartic confrontation in the national assembly are the enemies of peace, prosperity, and prudence. While the import and impact of government shutdowns are always oversold and overdramatized, we should try to avoid them all the same — and the prospect of a partial default on federal debt, while also exaggerated, should be something close to unthinkable — because we need order in the state. Predictability is precious.

 

Of course, conservatives want less federal spending, and we are right to want that. But here are a few points to consider: One, not every $1 in spending is equal — it matters, and it matters a great deal, what we spend that money on. There are urgent priorities right now that are going unattended, in spite of those trillions of dollars going out the door. Which brings us to: Two, the major spending action is on the mandatory side, not the discretionary side. If conservatives want to get spending under control, then we are going to have to do things that we have not recently been very much inclined to consider: reform popular entitlements, farm subsidies, and other so-called mandatory outlays. That, really, is what the reconciliation process is best suited for, and conservatives should use it for that when they have the opportunity to do so.

 

The alternative is to have another one of these emotionally rousing, economically destructive, politically disfiguring pageants of sanctimony and asininity every couple of years. That’s an option — and it will remain an option until we drive ourselves into a national crisis that forces us to make hard choices at precisely the moment when we are least able to bring great resources and long-term thinking to bear on our problems.

 

This should be the Republicans’ new Contract with America: “We’ll give you a federal government so unbelievably boring that you’ll rarely ever have to think about it. There won’t be very many surprises. With any luck, you’ll forget our names. Here’s how.”

 

“Here’s how,” is the hard part, of course. But we do have some examples to follow. Two cheers for the subcommittees and regular order. Three cheers for boredom.