“No Budget, No Pay”: How To Get Congress On Good Behavior
If taxpayers want better results from Congress, they must stop paying their elected officials for failure. After all, you get what you pay for.
That’s why I’ve introduced a bill called No Budget, No Pay. It’s not your typical congressional reform. It is the first effort to pay Congress for performance, the way that an increasing number of doctors, teachers, corporate executives, athletes, and other professionals are paid.
The bill, H.R. 3643, is so simple that it sells itself. If Congress fails to pass a budget and all 12 appropriations bills by the beginning of each fiscal year, October 1, congressional pay will stop. If Congress is even a day late, the penalties could be hundreds of dollars per day per congressman. Longer delays mean greater penalties (and the missed pay cannot be retroactively restored). It’s a harsh regime, but a necessary one. Our nation suffers when Congress fails to pay America’s bills on time.
Today’s Congress has not passed a budget in three years and has not completed all of its budget and appropriations bills on time in 15 years. Few incumbents can even remember meeting these obligations. This is no way to run a superpower.
Congress is so accustomed to today’s back-loaded schedule that it cannot imagine efficiency. Congress barely meets in January and February and, this year, the House was in session for only 10 days in May. Each house delights in passing bills that are dead on arrival in the other body. No Budget, No Pay would make the House and Senate actually talk to one another again. The heat from members to meet the deadline would be so intense that Congress, as a whole, could start forging deals.
A conventional reform would simply levy a flat penalty to punish Congress for tardiness. That’s like yanking a teenager’s allowance because he misbehaved. The goal should be to encourage better behavior. The threat of cutting congressional pay would do precisely that.
Properly understood, No Budget, No Pay is gentler than you think. It will not result in a single senator or congressman losing any pay. The reason: When everyone has an incentive to meet a deadline, you naturally finish on time, even early. For example, when California legislators tried it, they suddenly got much better at meeting deadlines. This is the power of aligned incentives: When everyone is on the same team, you have a much better chance of winning. The threat of punishment is more effective than the punishment itself.
This new type of reform engages the most powerful lobbyists on earth: congressional spouses. No one wants to miss a paycheck, especially spouses who are tired of excuses. These spouses will force Congress to work much harder much earlier in the winter and spring, instead of procrastinating into the summer and fall. Remember, members’ spouses have never let Congress miss a major holiday like Christmas. No Budget, No Pay puts October 1 in the same elite category as December 25.
The dirty secret of today’s Congress is that many members actually benefit from missing our financial deadlines. When they hold up negotiations, highlight a parochial cause, and take a budget or appropriations bill hostage, they get lots of free publicity and become a hero to the special interests they are protecting. This helps them finance their reelection campaigns. Some of their colleagues will honestly object to the delays, but most are just waiting for their own chance to grandstand. Meanwhile, taxpayers suffer because government agencies are crippled with unpredictable funding starts and stops on a month-to-month or even week-to-week basis. Sometimes a key agency like the Federal Aviation Administration is even forced to shut down many of its operations, as happened last August.
Having experienced (and often envied) their colleagues’ selfishness, many members are naturally afraid to be held accountable for the behavior of Congress as a whole. They are particularly afraid to vouch for the other body, either the House or Senate. Social scientists call this a collective action problem. It seems foolish to bet a paycheck that any group of politicians will be prompt. But these doubters have never been in a capitol where everyone was desperate to get paid.
Some fear that wealthy colleagues could afford to grandstand, while poorer members would be deprived of that free publicity. This is possible, but the rich are just as vulnerable to peer group pressure, sometimes more so, because they do not want to be stigmatized for being wealthy. The vast majority of members in the Senate and House need their paychecks and would be quick to ostracize anyone who slowed the budget process down, particularly a rich colleague. Fearing for their positions, party leaders would also make sure that wealthy members were not able to obstruct.
The task is an urgent one. The bill currently has 10 cosponsors in the Senate and 73 in the House. We need more cosponsors now, because there are only a few weeks left in this session of Congress before the November elections. Of course, Congress will miss its October 1 deadline again this year, but passage of No Budget, No Pay this fall would help us meet the deadline next year, in October of 2013. Unless Congress passes No Budget, No Pay this session, no adjustments to congressional pay will be possible until at least 2015, because the 27th Amendment requires an intervening election before any adjustment to congressional pay.
Since no president or Supreme Court has the constitutional power to reform Congress, Congress must heal itself with help from voters back home. Ultimately, Congressional medicine is like veterinary medicine: It must be strong enough to work, and tasty enough to swallow. No Budget, No Pay meets all these tests. It is hugely popular with voters, potent enough to make Congress meet the annual October 1 deadline, and palatable to members once they understand that they will be paid — because they will finish their work on time.
By: U. S. Rep Jim Cooper, The Atlantic, July 26, 2012
“Committed To Decline And Despair”: It’s Time For The GOP To Grow Up
The United States needs two responsible governing parties if it’s ever going to address its most pressing problems.
I’ve grown so used to dismissing Tom Friedman’s work for The New York Times that when he writes something genuinely good, it comes as a surprise. To wit, in his column for the Sunday paper, he aruges that our political system has devolved into a “vetocracy”—a system where “no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all.”
The culprits, according to Friedman, are polarization, broken institutional norms—in particular, filibuster abuse—the massive proliferation of special interests, and the growing importance of money in politics. The ultimate outcome of this, says Friedman, is governmental paralysis:
America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.
This dovetails with a problem that Friedman only alludes to:
[I]f you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.
If there’s anything that defines the current political moment, it’s the fact that—of the two major parties—one has completely abandoned the American consensus that Friedman describes. In the mythology of the Republican Party, government has never played a part in the country’s growth or prosperity—the “free market” alone is responsible for the nation’s current prosperity. Not only does this run counter to the historical record—to say nothing of observable reality—but it has resulted in a world where one party refuses to accept a role for government in anything.
As Friedman (obliquely) points out, this is a recipe for disaster. The institutions of the United States aren’t built for one-party rule, and we can’t make progress on pressing issues—climate change, health care, aging infrastructure—without a mutual understanding between the two parties. Republicans don’t have to abandon their preference for small government or their skepticism for federal programs, but effective action requires the GOP to back away from its opposition to the public sector, and reconsider the role of government in solving the nation’s problems.
Between Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the Republican Party is committed to a radical attack on the size and role of government. The Romney economic plan, which draws its ideas from Paul Ryan’s budget, would eliminate most non-defense discretionary spending, and funnel the savings to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Vital government functions like environmental regulation, scientific research, and poverty reduction would be sacrificed on the altar of small government. This isn’t a sustainable state of affairs. A world where government completely withdraws from the lives of ordinary Americans is one where we all but commit to a path of decline and disrepair.
If there’s anything that this country needs right now, it’s a responsible and functional Republican Party. I won’t hold my breath.
BY: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April23, 2012
Partisanship: Blame Grover Norquist, Not The Founders
Everyone recognizes that Washington is not working the way it should. This has led some on the left, like Harold Meyerson, to question whether the Founders “screwed up.”
Many on the right, meanwhile, are promoting radical changes to our constitutional system. They talk about a version of a Balanced Budget Amendment, which would require a super-majority for most changes in financial policy. This would enshrine in our Constitution the right’s do-little government philosophy.
But the Constitution is not the problem. If we want to get Washington working again, we should listen to the Founders — not blame them for problems of our own making or change the ground rules of the system of government they bequeathed to us.
True, the Founders established a deliberative democracy, with a series of checks and balances designed to prevent the majority from running roughshod over the rights of political minorities. But these checks and balances have served our nation well.
The problem is not the democratic system bestowed upon us by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The problem is the additional obstacles to action – the filibuster, hyper-partisanship, and special interest pledges – that our Founders would have found abhorrent.
Our Founders struck a delicate balance between the promotion of majority rule – the essential predicate for a democratic government of “We the People” – and the desire to protect minority rights and prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” The Constitution is designed to delay and temper majority rule while allowing a long-standing majority to get its way.
So, for example, the Constitution staggers the election of senators so that only one third of the Senate can change hands in any one election. As a result, it usually takes more than one election for any one party to gain a governing majority.
Modern politicians have placed layer after layer of lard on this deliberative system of government, ultimately producing the gridlock now plaguing Washington. The Senate Republicans now use the filibuster rule as a virtual requirement. Every piece of legislation must enjoy a super-majority of 60 votes in the Senate — meaning a determined minority can permanently stop the majority from getting its way.
President George Washington, in his farewell address to the nation, warned about just such “alterations” to our constitutional system. He said this would “impair the energy of the system.”
Washington also decried political parties. He passionately warned the nation against any effort “to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party.”
While political parties were forming and solidifying even as Washington uttered these words, our modern politicians have enshrined hyper-partisanship through tricks like the “majority of the majority” rule, whereby the House speaker will only bring to the House floor legislation that has the support of the majority of his political party.
It is hard to imagine a more powerful example of the precise party-over-country danger Washington warned us about.
Washington may have had the likes of Grover Norquist in mind when he warned that some men “will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Even anti-tax Republicans, like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Rep, Frank Wolf, have now decried the oversized role Norquist’s no new taxes pledge played in forcing the debt ceiling showdown and helping to prevent any solution that would have included new revenues. Coburn and others have warned their colleagues against putting Norquist’s “no–tax” pledge over their oath to support the Constitution and to serve “we the people” – not Norquist or any other special interests.
Washington today has serious problems, but we should not blame the city’s namesake for them. Rather, politicians of both parties should support a reform agenda designed to remove from our political system the modern procedural obstacles that have produced our current gridlock.
Maybe even in these divided political times we can all agree that when casting blame for what ails Washington, the fault it not with George Washington and our other Founding Fathers. It’s with the causes of our current gridlock – including figures like Norquist and his no-tax pledge.
By: Doug Kendall, Opinion Contributor, Politico, October 22, 2011
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