Green Bay Press-Gazette
Editorial
January 29, 2013
 

The idea seems simple: Do your job and you get paid. Don’t do your job and you don’t get paid. The execution, though, is a bit more complicated.

Last week, the House passed the No Budget No Pay Act, which withholds the salaries of members of Congress if they don’t pass a budget resolution by April 15.

This seems like a possibility given that the last time the Senate passed a budget resolution was April 29, 2009. In fact, Congress has met the Oct. 1 deadline for a budget only four times in the last 50 years.

The budget resolution is different from spending bills, but no less important. According to PolitiFact: “Since the passage of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, the Senate and the House are supposed to pass budget resolutions in the spring. These budget resolutions set a framework for spending, taxation and other fiscal items in the coming fiscal year. They also lay out general plans for the next four years. If these budget resolutions differ, the chambers are supposed to hammer out a compromise.”

Appropriations committees then put together spending bills based on the allocations in the budget resolutions.

The House added the No Budget No Pay Act onto the debt ceiling bill that increases the government’s borrowing cap and suspends the $14 trillion public debt limit through May 18 to ensure its passage, much to the dismay of many in the Senate. Many senators call the act a gimmick.

We say to the Senate: tough. This provision might not solve the gridlock in Congress, but it’s a start. If it succeeds in pushing the Senate into action, it will be worth it, for its been this house of Congress, controlled by Democrats last year and this, that did not take up any of the House or the Senate Appropriations Committee bills in 2012, according to PoltiFact.

U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Sherwood, has been a proponent of the no-budget-no-pay type measures. In the 112th Congress, he was the lead co-sponsor of similar legislation and was the leading House Republican on the bill during this session of Congress.

Ribble has shown that he is exploring different avenues to get beyond the partisan bickering in Congress. He is a founding member of Problem Solvers with the bipartisan group No Labels, which aims to move politics toward problem-solving and find some common ground.

We applaud Ribble’s efforts to hold lawmakers, including himself, accountable to the people they serve. It would be nice to see more teeth in the act — any withheld pay would be released on the last day of the congressional term instead of being withheld altogether — but the constitution interferes with some of those wishes.

As for those who call the act a gimmick, they might be right. But what do they have to offer to get beyond this impasse? When they have something more tangible than criticism to offer, we’ll be all ears. Until then, we hope that this act, and the actions of lawmakers like Ribble, prompt some action out of a Congress more willing to fight than find common ground.
 

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