High Time

The U.S. Supreme Court has now ordered Congress and the President to do what they should have done in the first place: Make the hard decisions about which federal expenditures to keep and which to cut. The people’s representatives thought that they could avoid that burden by enacting the Gramm-Rudman law, which would have activated “automatic” across-the-board cuts if the budget deficit was not sufficiently reduced. The court has ruled the law unconstitutional as a violation of the separation of powers.

More than being unconstitutional, Gramm-Rudman is bad policy. One of the most important functions of Congress and the President is to decide which programs to support and which not to. A governmental budget is a political document, not a financial one. It represents the sum total of choices that legislators and the President make about how the public treasury should be spent. Deciding to spend more on defense and less on social programs, or the other way around, is a political choice.

By enacting the Gramm-Rudman measure, Congress tried to get out of making those choices, which is exactly the attitude that led to the staggering budget deficits that the law was supposed to fix. If the deficit is ever going to be brought under control, congressmen and senators must marshal their courage to say no to some people who want federal money.

The Supreme Court’s ruling against Gramm-Rudman was based on the fact that the law empowered the comptroller general to enforce it. The comptroller general is appointed by the President but is removable by Congress, and, the court reasoned, he is therefore not a member of the executive branch of government. “Congress in effect has retained control over the execution of the act and has intruded into the executive function,” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote for the majority. “The Constitution does not permit such intrusion.”

Since the court’s ruling turns on this narrow point, Congress might try to get around it by giving responsibility for execution of the law to a member of the executive branch of government who is not removable by the legislature. This would be a mistake.

Congress and the President must face the fact that they, and they alone, are responsible for spending public money. If they want to fund programs, they have to raise the money to pay for them. Because of sheer political cowardice, they have been unwilling to match revenues to expenditures. They thought that Gramm-Rudman would do it for them, but it won’t.

Now the ball is back to Congress. It must either cut programs or raise taxes, or both. That’s what the people elected their representatives to do, and it’s high time that they did it.