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The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981
(OBRA, aka Gramm-Latta 2)

OBRA was the most sweeping legislation in modern American history. The budget resolution instructed thirteen Senate and fifteen House legislative, authorizing committees to report back to the budget committees with changes in programs ranging from Amtrak subsidies to Women's, Infants' and Children's nutrition, from AFDC to the Veterans Administration. More than its substance, the 1981 reconciliation was seen at the time as a revolution in process. For nearly two centuries Congress has been organized around its committees; in these sublegislatures members used their greater expertise, knowledge of substance plus connections with the affected interests, and power not to report legislation, to dominate policy making in their domains. Now the committees deliberated, but they did so, "meeting with a gun pointed at our heads," as Carl Perkins, chairman of Education and Labor, described their plight. They could not stall, or hold much in the way of hearings, or even represent their members. They were under orders to report out cuts,


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like it or not. Democratic budgeters insisted that the committees respond, and the leadership backed the budgeters because it felt the party could not be seen as opposing deficit reduction. Suddenly, the American Congress, the most nonpartisan of national legislatures, saw an immense package of policies treated as a matter of party loyalty. The Republicans did not like the committees' work; they produced a substitute bill, once again cosponsored by Gramm and Latta and therefore called Gramm-Latta 2. The final showdown between the Democratic version of OBRA and the Gramm-Latta 2 substitute was a partisan battle unprecedented in its scope. Party responsibility and, most amazing, its enforcement had at long last come to Congress.

The budget resolution provided each committee spending reduction targets that had been justified by detailed assumptions about cutting methods. Only the targets, however, not the detailed assumptions, were binding. Committee members could meet the targets however they chose. They did so very differently than the administration and its allies had intended. The latter, therefore, consulting with GOP leaders and some conservative southern Democratic boll weevils, prepared a substitute for the work of seven committees. In the haste and last-minute bargaining, no one saw the alternative in final form until the day of the debate. Stuart Eizenstat, head of domestic policy in the Carter White House, described the implication of having a vote on such a package:

Passage of a Stockman-sponsored substitute on the House floor would create something akin to a parliamentary system, in which the prime minister's legislative package is voted on with little committee action and limited capacity for modification…. Congress would be forced to make the most sweeping changes in a generation in the substances of federal programs without going through the historic deliberative process to assure sound results or paying heed to the work of its own committees.[1]

Having deliberated under the pressure of time limitations that made it impossible to have hearings allowing a voice to those affected by changes, the committees themselves were in danger of having no say. If Reagan was proposing a revolution in spending priorities, reconciliation was a revolution in our form of governance.

"Congressional Government," wrote Woodrow Wilson long ago, is "Committee Government." Hence congressional power is committee power; the Reconciliation Act, by overruling committees, was widely viewed as imposing on the rights of Congress itself. "Reconciliation," proclaimed Richard Bolling, "is the most brutal and blunt instrument used by a president in an attempt to control the congressional process since Nixon used impoundment." From another point of view, congressional power is the ability to confront problems and apply to them the


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judgment of the people, as filtered through a representational process. From this very different perspective, Leon Panetta, chairman of the House Budget Committee reconciliation task force, declared that "no one … can question that this document represents the ability of this institution to do its job, and to that extent I think our democracy has been well served."[2]

The sheer sweep of OBRA made its substance seem more revolutionary than it really was. It was very important, but other acts of Congress had had greater effects on our nation. In 1964 alone, at least two—the Civil Rights Act and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—were more important: the first committed the federal government to battle for racial (and later other categorical) equality in our society; and the second facilitated escalating the Vietnam War. In 1981 ERTA, to which we will return, was more important because it reduced taxes far more steeply than reconciliation cut spending, thereby shaping the politics of a decade.

The importance of reconciliation, however, could not be judged solely by policy outcomes in 1981. A better question is whether reconciliation represented a new pattern of decision making through which actions outside the committee—interest group relationship—whether ideological forces, or party, or the independent frustrations of politicians themselves—would become dominant.


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