Chris DeMuth of the Hudson Institute (and former president of the American Enterprise Institute) outlines in the latest edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis a plan to help Congress reclaim its rightful place as one of the three equal branches of the federal government.
First, Congress should retrieve the taxing, spending, and borrowing powers it has delegated to executive agencies, and place all agencies on annual appropriations regardless of their sources of revenues. This will require statutes signed by the President, so the statutes should be strictly matters of constitutional housekeeping, unencumbered by confrontations over divisive policies. For example, the Dodd-Frank Act’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded by a share of Federal Reserve profits, entirely free of congressional appropriations. Many congressional Republicans loathe this Bureau and would like to clip its wings, but for constitutional purposes Congress should simply put the Bureau on regular appropriations—initially at the level the Bureau has already set for itself. Similarly, Congress should retake responsibility for the federal debt, now coursing north of $18 trillion, rather than pretending that capping the debt without limiting spending is a good tactic for extracting policy concessions from President Obama. In these cases and others, the immediate need is not to parade conservative bona fides, but rather to be sure that Congress is playing with a full deck in policy contests to come.
Second, Congress should exercise its appropriations power. It doesn’t need a statute for this—it needs only to follow the procedures laid down in the Budget Act of 1974, passing individual appropriations bills for the President’s signature on a regular basis. It would then be in a position to assert Republican priorities on spending levels and to counter selected Obama initiatives with appropriations riders. It could do so with moderately aggressive bills the President might sign, or with highly aggressive ones he would certainly veto—in order to dramatize policy differences, but without shooting itself in the foot with a threatened government shutdown.
Third, Congress should relearn the arts of legislating, and thereby recover some of the lawmaking powers it has handed off to the regulatory agencies. Congressional Republicans say they want to replace Obamacare with a program that achieves its goals more completely, at less cost and with less coercion. And they profess to be unhappy with the ways that Dodd-Frank, the Clean Air Act, and many other statutes are being interpreted and enforced, and with the inanity of the tax code and other statutes enacted by earlier Congresses. But they cannot be good to their word without stepping up to their responsibility for collective choice. Constructing two legislative majorities for such major reforms is tedious, unglamorous, often frustrating business—but it is the source of Congress’s constitutional might.
