Hiding Behind the Budget Act

The Budget Control Act of 2011, which President Obama signed on Tuesday after Congress passed it by wide margins, is as contrived as the artificial crisis that spawned it. The bill, like a tired opera production, is full of clumsy staging and failed gimmicks left over from previous decades. It is not only bad policy in its goals of cutting spending too much, but it is bad procedure. It allows members of Congress to avoid responsibility for their actions through a cutout committee, a spending limit and the pretense that this Congress can tell the next one what to do.

The budget act does its initial damage with a $917 billion cap on spending over the next decade, then turns everything over to a special joint committee to do the rest. Between now and Thanksgiving, this committee is supposed to come up with as much as $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures. In theory, that can be anything: tax increases, tax reform or cuts to the military, domestic programs or entitlements. In practice, don’t expect much.

That starts with the fact that this “supercommittee” will be evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats of both chambers, appointed by their leaders. While a thoughtful group like the so-called Gang of Six was a self-selected bipartisan bunch of senators who wanted to reach a compromise, this committee is likely to be chosen to avoid a compromise — especially by the Republicans. Conservatives are already warning Republican leaders not to name anyone who might waver on eliminating tax loopholes, such as Senator Tom Coburn. Democrats are only slightly more likely to appoint members who are willing to take a long-term look at entitlement changes.

But suppose the committee avoids the almost inevitable deadlock. If seven lawmakers agreed on a huge deficit-cutting package, it would be sent to Congress for a take-it-or-leave-it vote, no changes allowed. That’s an enormous responsibility given to a ridiculously small number of people, chosen for ideological purposes. It reduces Congress’s most fundamental power of the purse to an undemocratic and untransparent huddle. Congress can reject the panel’s package, but that means an automatic blade of $1.2 trillion in cuts that would be painful to both sides.

That trigger mechanism, of course, is another fundamentally antidemocratic gimmick designed to take legislative choices out of the hands of elected legislators. It is based on the premise that lawmakers can’t be trusted to make hard choices on their own, but history makes clear that such triggers also can’t be trusted. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget law of 1985 had ferocious automatic cuts, which — surprise — Congress turned out not to like. Lawmakers used tricks and loopholes to get around them.

In 1990, that idea was dumped and replaced with a device known as “pay-go,” which required both entitlement increases and tax cuts to be paid for. The mechanism was somewhat more successful in balancing the budget, but Republicans resisted the idea of paying for tax cuts and the Bush administration did not attempt to pay for the two wars it started or the Medicare drug plan. The concept was revived last year but with gaping loopholes.

Supercommittees and trigger mechanisms have a terrible track record in Washington because they constrain responsibility and political choice. The world changes every month, and legislative straitjackets are almost always discarded after a big show of lacing them on. This bill, like its predecessors, will probably be sharply modified years from now after the fight that produced it is long forgotten. In the meantime, voters should be wary of politicians who substitute gimmickry for governing.

[The New York Times Editorial]