Spratt Brings Tough Budget Control Measure to House Floor
WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) has introduced a package of budget measures designed to control spending and move the budget back to balance. His bill reinstates the “Pay-As-You-Go” (PAYGO) rules and grants the President the power to cut spending items from appropriation bills, while protecting programs like Social Security and Medicare from such cuts.
“If we really want to wipe out the deficit, we should adopt the entire package of proposals included in my bill,” said Spratt. “The Pay-As-You-Go rules worked well in the 1990s. They expired in 2002 and need to be reinstated. They hold far more potential than the item veto for putting the budget on a path to balance.”
Spratt is the Ranking Member on the House Budget Committee. He offered a similar proposal last week in committee as a substitute to a bill offered by committee Republicans. Spratt’s measure, the “Deficit Reduction and Effective Legislative Line Item Veto Act,” contains a package of tools to get the budget under better control.
Spratt’s bill reinstates the two-sided PAYGO rules. The PAYGO rules require that the bottom line of the budget be held constant, by requiring that any entitlement spending increase or revenue reduction be offset.
Spratt’s bill also amends the Budget Act to require that fast-track reconciliation procedures be used only to reduce the deficit. Congress created the reconciliation process to make it easier to reduce the deficit by setting up special procedures to facilitate hard-to-pass budget cuts, yet this Congress exploits reconciliation to pass legislation that swells the deficit.
In addition, Spratt’s bill allows members more time to review legislation before voting on it, and it gives the President expedited rescission authority. This provision allows the President to propose spending items to be deleted from appropriation bills by legislation that is guaranteed a fast-track vote in Congress.
“A well-written expedited rescission power could be a useful budget tool. I have written such bills and managed them to passage on the House floor. But these bills complemented other budget enforcement tools then in place, such as Pay-As-You-Go, discretionary spending caps, and sequestration,” said Spratt. “Merely granting the President expedited rescission authority alone – as provided by H.R. 4890, the Republican expedited rescission bill – will do little to put the budget on the path to balance.”
Spratt drew the following distinctions between the Republican bill (H.R. 4890) and the expedited rescission bills that he brought to the floor of the House in the 1990s:
1. H.R. 4890 allows the President to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Benefits, and other entitlement programs. Spratt’s bill protects these programs from the fast-track, summary cuts made in the rescission process.
2. H.R. 4890 allows the President a 45-day window to send spending items back to Congress for rescission; it also allows the President five rescission bills for each appropriation bill. Spratt’s bill sticks closer to the original time-frame, providing 10 days, and allows the President one rescission bill for each appropriation bill. The Republican bill could result in chaos, more than fifty rescission bills; Spratt’s bill would result in no more than eleven.
3. H.R. 4890 allows members of Congress one vote, up or down, on the whole package, and no means of singling out and saving a worthy project. Spratt’s bill borrows another provision similar to the original rescission bill, and allows 100 members in the House and 16 members in the Senate to seek a separate vote on a spending item they support.
4. H.R. 4890 allows the President to rescind “targeted tax benefits,” but defines these as tax provisions affecting only one taxpayer. This makes a sham of an important provision. Spratt’s bill, like the original bill, rejects such a narrow definition; it defines “targeted tax benefits” as tax benefits that favor 100 or fewer taxpayers.
5. H.R. 4890 allows the President to freeze funding of an item he seeks to rescind for as long as 90 days. Spratt’s bill allows a 30-day freeze, or roughly the time a rescission request will take to run its course through Congress.
Spratt also noted major provisions of his bill for which H.R. 4890 has no counterpart :
1. To bring down the deficit, Spratt’s bill reinstates the Pay-As-You-Go rules that helped turn record deficits into record surpluses in the 1990s.
2. To increase scrutiny of spending items, Spratt’s bill includes earmark reforms, requiring justification and identification of the sponsor and the beneficiaries. Spratt’s bill also guarantees members of Congress three days to look over bills with spending earmarks.
3. To avoid abuse, Spratt’s bill bars the use of rescission threats to obtain votes for other legislation.
Spratt called his bill “better on all counts.”
“If the objective is deficit-reduction, my bill does more by re-instating PAYGO plus rescission. If the objective is to increase spending scrutiny, my bill does more, due to earmark reforms and the layover of appropriation bills that contain earmarks. If the objective is to give the President more power over the spending process, my bill does that, but adds safeguards to prevent abuse.”
Key Features of the Spratt Deficit Reduction and Effective Legislative Line Item Veto Act
1. Reinstates two-sided PAYGO, applicable both to entitlement increases and revenue reductions.
2. Amends the Budget Act to prevent reconciliation from being used to make the deficit worse.
3. Adds earmark reform provisions from the Obey bill, H. Res. 659, which—
- require disclosure of earmark sponsors, recipients, and any financial interest that a Member might have in such earmark;
- prohibit Members from conditioning the inclusion or exclusion of an earmark on any vote cast by the Member in whose district the earmarked project will be carried out;
- require a two-thirds vote to waive rules requiring that copies of legislation that includes earmarks be made available to members three days before such legislation is considered.
4. Creates expedited rescission authority, following the model of similar bills passed by the House in 1993 and 1994.
5. Prohibits the President or executive branch officials from using the rescission authority as a bargaining tool to secure votes on other legislation.
6. During consideration of rescission legislation, allows a motion to strike and remove items from the spending cut list in the House and the Senate, if 100 House Members or 16 Senators propose it.
7. Limits the number of cancellation proposals the President can send to 1 proposal per bill.
8. Limits the time the President has to propose a cancellation after signing a bill to 10 days – as opposed to 45 days in H.R. 4890.
9. Limits the time the President can withhold funds he has proposed for cancellation to 30 days for a regular bill and 7 days for emergency spending--as opposed to 90 days in H.R. 4890.
10. Protects entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and veterans’ benefits, from summary, expedited rescission cuts.
11. Sunsets the bill in two years, as opposed to six years in H.R. 4890.
