Congress Only Tinkers On The Budget

When it takes up President Bush's proposed budget this year, Congress will not only look at pruning federal spending. It will also consider lopping off a few of its own limbs.

The White House has proposed a series of measures to boost its control over the federal budget, from giving the President veto power over the annual congressional budget resolution Congress's memo to itself on what it plans to do with federal spending to creating a commission to review the performance of federal programs, a role that Congress is supposed to perform routinely. On Capitol Hill these measures will probably be controversial, as legislators fret about handing too much budgetary power to the President. I would agree with them but for one thing: They've already done it.

True, you wouldn't think so if you've listened to congressional leaders and committee chairmen over the past several years. From time to time, they've liked to maintain the pretense of congressional vitality by insisting that the White House's budget or some significant portion of it is dead on arrival. That's just not accurate. It is the President's budget that sets the agenda, and every year the overwhelming majority of it over 90 percent gets enacted. Keep this in mind as you read later this year about the wrangling over this program or that on Capitol Hill: It's largely tinkering. As the levelheaded insider's magazine, the National Journal, put it not long ago, the President is King of the Budget, and he'll get the vast majority of what he wants.

Accustomed as we are to the President laying out the agenda for how the federal government ought to raise and spend the people's money, for most of our nation's history it was different. The framers of the Constitution were quite explicit in giving Congress, rather than the President, the authority to tax and spend. They rightly saw that the power of the purse is what sets the government on its course and allows it to function, and they wanted that power held by the immediate representatives of the people, as James Madison put it. In fact, before 1921 the President didn't even prepare an overall budget proposal; instead, the various executive-branch agencies sent their requests for funding directly to Congress.

All of this began to change as the power of the presidency increased during the New Deal and World War II. More recently, however, what began as a re-balancing of budgetary initiative has become a wholesale shift in power far beyond anything this nation has encountered before. If there is comprehensive debate over budgetary priorities these days, it takes place within the administration, as the various agencies and departments argue with the powerful Office of Management and Budget over their funding levels. Debate and votes within Congress, where the heart of our democracy is supposed to lie, often feel like an after-thought and, at best, affect the budget only on the margins. In a major reversal of roles, Congress has put itself in the position of influencing the budget only through vetoing presidential spending proposals, which it is generally reluctant to do. The Founders would be flabbergasted by this development.

Some of this is due to changing budgetary circumstances. The discretionary portion of the budget that is, the portion not given over to such entitlement programs as Social Security and Medicare, which are largely ignored by Congress has shrunk over the years, to the point where it now makes up about a third of the budget. But that third includes spending on the military, which Congress is loath to touch, so in truth its chance to weigh in is even more limited than it appears.

The White House, too, has done what it could to chip away at congressional prerogatives. It has acted forcefully to keep the congressional leadership on the same page, and has avoided including the President's top priorities such as funding the war in Iraq in the budget, virtually removing any chance for Congress to scrutinize them as part of the regular budget process.

But much of Congress's budgetary weakness is self-inflicted. It has failed in recent years to carry out robust oversight of federal programs, thereby depriving itself of a way to gauge their effectiveness at budget time. It has mostly abandoned its tradition of appropriating money by using the expertise amassed by its individual committees, instead relying on giant omnibus bills that are written in close cooperation with the administration. And it has basically refused to assert its prerogatives to bring up large issues such as tax policy or entitlement reform apart from the President.

Putting together a budget is not glamorous work. It entails paying close attention to numbers, a mastery of obscure and often mind-numbing details about federal programs, and a willingness to spend long hours scrutinizing government in ways that are unlikely to garner much attention back home. Yet the budget is the basic operating document of the federal government. It was hardly an accident that when the framers laid out the Congress's duties, the very first was to lay and collect taxesand provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States. Congress possesses no responsibility more important. The fact that it has been so willing to cede its authority in this sphere to the President suggests that its long tradition of viewing itself as a co-equal branch of government has ended.

(Lee Hamilton was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years and is now Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University.)

Audio Version

We Urgently Need Redistricting Reform

We can thank the computer for adding much to the convenience of modern life. One of its less-noticed contributions, though, should draw our apprehension, not our thanks: the ability of legislative incumbents to escape competitive elections. In this regard, at least, computers are helping to undermine our democracy.

I'm talking, of course, about redistricting. These days, your basic laptop can so finely parse a neighborhood, a street, even a particular house, that the people responsible for drawing new legislative districts can achieve pretty much any political complexion they wish for the districts they produce. Politicians, in other words, now get to choose their voters, rather than the other way around.

Usually, this yields one of two results: a set of districts that gives the party in power a lock on as many seats as possible; or a legislative map that protects incumbents of both parties. The result in either case is the same. Competitive elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and many state legislatures are becoming a relic of the past, and our representative democracy is seriously undermined as a result.

Perhaps the most striking example of this is California , where in 2001 Democrats and Republicans agreed that they would draw new district maps to protect the registration advantage of whichever party held the seat at the time. They did a thorough job. In the 2002 elections, only three legislative seats changed party hands. In 2004, not a single one -- not one of the 53 congressional seats or 100 legislative districts -- fell to the opposite party. As one political scientist in the state puts it, it was surely the most complete and effective bipartisan gerrymander in American history.
You might wonder what's wrong with this. After all, every registered voter in a district still gets to cast a vote, and if most of them happen to prefer the incumbent, so be it.

Let's think about this from two perspectives. As a voter, would you rather live in a district in which you knew that no matter how hard you tried, your preferred candidate could never win, or in a district in which your party had a realistic -- though not certain -- chance of prevailing every other November? For that matter, even if you take some comfort from living in a district where you're part of a clear majority, it's hard to get very excited at election time, knowing that the conclusion is foregone. I think it's hardly an accident that as elections have grown less competitive, the interest and participation of ordinary citizens have waned.

Even more troubling, though, is the impact of current redistricting practices on the makeup of the U.S. House and of state legislatures. When a district is drawn to favor a particular party, it means that politicians running in it don't need to appeal to a cross-section of the electorate; instead, their constituency lies within their party. Not surprisingly, this means that they focus on appealing to the hard-core base of the party, and tend to be more extreme than the great mass of voters. Looking at the intense partisanship and ideological rigidity of our legislative leaders these days, ordinary Americans often wonder what happened to the political center. My response is that we redistricted it out of existence.

There is a simple solution to this, though it's not a particularly easy one: remove responsibility for redistricting from the hands of politicians. Drawing congressional and legislative lines is a state function, and in most states it still falls to state legislators and the governor to agree on a map. Several states, though, hand the job to a bipartisan commission, sometimes made up of retired judges appointed by the legislative leaders of both parties. Following Iowa 's lead, Idaho , Arizona and Alaska all switched to this method during the 1990s, and interest is clearly growing in other states, most notably in California , where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has made the issue a priority.

This is a heartening development. Not long ago, researchers at Claremont McKenna College in California studied election results in states where legislators do not draw the political lines. They found unambiguously that districts in these states were more politically competitive. Looking back at the 90s, the senior researcher told the Los Angeles Times, there are many more districts that change hands over the decade than where the legislature draws the line.

I fervently hope that this cause gains steam quickly. The U.S. House of Representatives has been known since the founding of our nation as the people's house, but if its members come to represent only the committed activists of both political parties, it is hard to see how they can live up to the founders' expectations. Elections need to reflect public opinion as it evolves and changes over time. Political competition forces candidates to understand the needs and desires of voters, it requires them to justify and explain their positions, it offers voters a true opportunity to weigh the qualities they want in a representative, and it ensures that voters can make a choice in the marketplace of politics. A competitive election is the central avenue for our self-expression as citizens, and the legitimacy and vitality of Congress depend on it. We ought not let the convenience of incumbent lawmakers stand in its way.

(Lee Hamilton was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years and is now Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University.)

Audio Version

Lobbying Murkiness Undermines Our Trust in Congress

Every so often, a scandal comes along to remind us of the behind-the-scenes role lobbyists play in Washington. At the moment, it’s the allegations swirling around a well-connected power broker and his representation of Indian tribes seeking casinos. Such stories make for good news fodder, but I wish lobbying came in for more than sporadic scrutiny. The disturbing fact about Congress is how little we actually know about the influence wielded by lobbyists– and the people who pay them– on the everyday workings of Congress and the government.

Let me say up front that I am not criticizing lobbying. When done well, it’s a necessary and helpful part of the governing process. Most lobbyists are honest men and women who know that the single worst thing they can do is to misrepresent their position or give a member of Congress inaccurate information. The old image of lobbyists as cigar-smoking fat-cats waving wads of cash in front of gullible and greedy policy-makers is just that– old and very out of date. Lobbyists today are sophisticated men and women who have figured out how to make the system work for themselves and their clients; indeed, the odds are overwhelming that if you hold a strong view about some issue of public policy, somewhere in Washington there’s a lobbyist who’s promoting it. It is part of how we make decisions in our government, and there need be nothing sinister about it.

Which is precisely why we need stronger laws governing the disclosure of who is lobbying for what. The 14,000 registered lobbyists who are paid to shape federal decision-making are a fact of life in Washington– as any member of Congress who meets them in his or her office, in the hallways, even in the rest room can tell you. When an important vote is pending, you cannot walk from your office to the floor of the House or Senate without bumping into hordes of them, lined up to signal with a thumb up or down how they’re hoping you vote. It can be annoying, sometimes, but there’s nothing harmful about that.

What is harmful is that most Americans have little notion of the extent to which winners and losers in public policy are determined by a lobbying game of which they are entirely unaware. There may be no direct connection between a vote in the House or Senate and the money spent on wining and dining members of Congress, treating them to rounds of golf, flying them to warm or exotic locales, and, of course, underwriting their campaigns, but the well-heeled do not spend that money idly. In a just-released report, the Center for Public Integrity found that since 1998, lobbyists have spent $13 billion to influence the federal government– $2.4 billion alone in 2003, the last year for which data are available.

What does that buy? It buys them access and a sympathetic ear, and it can pay dividends many times over when their policy preferences are made into law. Lobbyists will often brag that the money spent on lobbying by their clients hugely rewards those clients, from bail-outs for bad market decisions to tax breaks to immunity from certain laws. At the same time, the vast majority of ordinary Americans do not participate in this game to nearly the same extent, and as a result, their interests can be slighted.

There may be no way, consistent with First Amendment protections of free speech, to level the playing field for those without resources, but there is an antidote: public information and opinion. The truth is, there are a lot of private interests who would rather not make the public aware that their money lies behind this or that cause on Capitol Hill. These are the people, companies and groups that form organizations or trade associations with innocuous names like “the Association for Freedom,” which then go about their business of promoting special interest legislation with no one the wiser. Our challenge as a society is to create and pass lobby disclosure laws with teeth, so that no matter how someone spends money to influence legislation, the rest of us will know it.

At the moment, the laws are far too docile in this regard. While the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act was supposed to make the activity more transparent, the Center for Public Integrity reports that “the federal disclosure system is in disarray.” Roughly one in five of the companies registered to lobby failed to file required forms, and overall, 14,000 documents that should have been filed are missing, while another fifth of the required lobbying forms were filed late. The Center found that “countless forms are filed with portions that are blank or improperly filled out. An unknown number of lobbyists neglect or refuse to file any disclosure forms whatsoever.” In essence, we have a lobby disclosure system in name only.

This is not just a matter of fairness. It goes to the heart of congressional legitimacy. Supreme Court Justice David Souter once said, “I think most people assume– I do, certainly– that someone making an extraordinarily large contribution is going to get some kind of an extraordinary return for it. I think that is a pervasive assumption.” It is a harmful one, as well, undermining the faith of ordinary Americans in our political system. We might not be able to limit these contributions, but we should certainly know who made them, and hold our elected representatives to account for their behavior as a result.

(Lee Hamilton was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years and is now Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University.)

Audio Version

It's Time For The Public To Fund Congressional Travel

Seven years ago, approaching the end of my career in the U.S. House, I introduced a bill to tighten the rules governing travel by members of Congress. The idea did not meet with much enthusiasm– I managed to convince only a few of my colleagues to sign on as co-sponsors. Other than a few passing jokes about tilting at windmills, everyone else ignored it.

Today, with Congress enmeshed in the ruckus over who paid for various trips by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and others, I find myself hoping that some current member will pick up that baton and run with it. In fact, I hope he or she will go a step further than I did, and move to ban all private funding for congressional travel. It is time– indeed, long overdue– to say that when a member of Congress needs to travel on official business, the government should pay for it and the specifics of the trip should be disclosed in detail. I’d like to think that in the current climate, the notion might get a respectful hearing, not just a few private chuckles.

We should get one thing straight: Trips by lawmakers, both within this country and abroad, are a good thing. I want legislators to be as well-informed as they can be when they go about making policy, and there’s no substitute for the insights you gain when you see a situation for yourself. Travel opens your eyes, and if you do it right, taking care to talk to people well outside the orbit of officialdom, it is invaluable for any member of Congress who believes in the independence and vitality of the institution. The question, in other words, is not whether members of Congress should travel, it’s who pays and who controls the agenda.

As you no doubt know if you’ve been following the DeLay saga, House rules prohibit lobbyists from paying for a House member’s trip. But as you also no doubt know, there are enough loopholes in those rules to undermine their intent. As an article in The Wall Street Journal put it not long ago, “A fast-growing trend in the business of influencing government is corporate-funded trips, carrying lawmakers, their staffs and often their spouses to attend industry seminars, tour plants and speak at annual meetings. Because the trips are paid for by corporations and trade associations--and not the hired-guns who lobby for them--such trips are permitted under House and Senate rules.” The result is that on these trips private interests can get unfettered access to members of Congress for a period of days. Lawmakers may argue that they learn important things as they’re sitting in meetings– or by the pool, or in a golf cart– and no doubt they do. But appearances matter, and the public needs to have confidence that wealthy insiders aren’t getting a leg up by showering legislators with favors. If a congressman’s education is truly in the public’s best interest, then he should have no trouble shedding the appearance of coziness with well-heeled interests and asking the public to underwrite the trip.

I’ll admit that the case gets a bit more complicated when a trip is bankrolled by a think tank or public-policy institute. I went on a few of those myself. The conversations were led by knowledgeable experts, and I came away much better informed. But I also came away knowing that, even if the trip’s sponsor wasn’t putting on a hard sell the way a corporate sponsor might, it still had an interest in “educating” me– encouraging engagement with another country, for instance, or closer attention to one of its domestic priorities. If a trip is worth taking in order to improve legislation or to strengthen congressional oversight, we should all underwrite it. If it’s not, there’s no reason to go.

This is not to say that once the federal government funds all congressional travel, our problems will end. The executive branch coordinates many of the trips, and it has its own agenda. That’s why it’s crucial for legislators to keep control of the schedule when they travel abroad, to visit not just a variety of public officials but also meet with newspaper editors and academics and even Peace Corps volunteers, so that they can get as unfettered a view as possible of the situation on the ground. Members of Congress will always be responsible for making sure that taxpayers get the most from a trip.

And that’s really what this is about, isn’t it? The world, both here and abroad, is a complicated place. The truth is, I would question a member of Congress who refused to get out and poke around; we’re better off as a country when our lawmakers expose themselves to divergent opinions and all those shades of gray. But we also need to be sure that they’re doing it to benefit us, not just a handful of private interests. It’s time to stop the games-playing with congressional rules, and to ban outright the private sponsorship of congressional travel.

(Lee Hamilton was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years and is now Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University.)

Audio file is here