How the New Process Worked

In 1980, as this book begins, Congress had been working within its new process for five years.^[19] One cannot say the system was working as intended because its sponsors disagreed on the intent. A few developments, however, were worth noting.

The budget committees had developed very differently in the Senate and the House. Senate Budget Chairman Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) and ranking minority member Henry Bellmon (R-Okla.) worked to develop resolutions that could command substantial bipartisan support. In the House, by contrast, Republicans viewed the resolutions as the place to demonstrate the difference between the two parties. Because resolutions

became partisan battles, the committee heads had to win majorities entirely within the Democratic party. Party leaders therefore became key actors in the House process. House resolutions tended to be more liberal than the Senate's, given the different coalitions needed to pass them.

First resolutions had not significantly constrained spending. If anything, they allowed liberal majorities in 1975 and 1976 to justify their opposition to President Ford's proposed spending cuts. The heavily Democratic majorities of 1975–1978, however, should not have been expected to want to limit spending. By 1979, in the wake of the Proposition 13 tax revolt in California, inflation fears, and a Democratic president's attempts to restrain spending, the First Resolution was assuming some spending cuts.

But the system had no teeth. Reconciliation was too late in the schedule; no one could expect committees to draft, debate, report, pass, and then confer on reconciliation bills in the ten days allowed—from September 15 to September 25. The big stick of the Second Resolution was the point of order against legislation that breached its totals, but this weapon was less than it seemed. The point of order could be waived; although HBC and SBC in different ways influenced that decision, the committees could be overridden on the floor. The proposals for increased spending could be virtually irresistible (e.g., food stamps running out of money or a Mount St. Helens blowing its top). Most important, even when a set of spending acts passed after the Second Resolution, the overall total was not likely to be exceeded until the last one or two bills. And that straggler was likely to be totally guiltless (like foreign aid, always late and always slashed before it reached the floor). It did not make much sense to savage one bill because of failings on others.

Although the new process was weak, it nonetheless was used in the battles over policy. Program opponents (or supporters) could claim that the First Resolution did not (or did) leave room in the budget for funding. Seeking to satisfy constituents, members could propose extra funding for pet programs in budget debate, where the results were not binding. Thus to the regular legislative process of authorizations and to the alternate legislative process of appropriations now was added a shadow legislative process of budget resolutions. We say "shadow" because its forms were produced by real bodies and real conflict, but themselves had no substance.

Whatever their effect, budget resolutions stood forth as visible statements about the direction of the nation. Therefore, the seven-year budget war did not end; only the field and weapons changed. Most Democrats and most Republicans, egalitarian liberals and individualist conservatives, fought over the size of government and, within that, over

emphasis on military or social welfare spending. The budget resolution figures for spending and revenues, for defense and social functions, became battlegrounds even though they were not binding.