House Republicans Propose Sensible Measures Along with Raising Debt Ceiling
The ongoing dispute about increasing the government’s borrowing limit has the potential to create an anesthetizing boredom because such contretemps occur frequently. However, some people who are fluent in today’s vocabulary of catastrophe are concerned about a default that will blow prosperity to rags and atoms. The Republicans are resisting progressives’ usual three priorities: unrestrained spending, unconstrained presidential power, and unlimited deference by Congress to the administrative state’s regulatory agencies. Biden’s need to climb down from his refusal to negotiate with the legislature — which enacted the debt ceiling — is related to the fact that he is the most rhetorically clumsy president since the invention of broadcasting.
House Republicans have been prone to fractiousness and fantasies, such as promising to balance the budget in 10 years, which the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says would require cutting nondefense discretionary spending 85%. However, they have now united with sensible measures to couple raising the debt ceiling. One such measure is restraint in the rate of increase of the small (15%) discretionary nondefense spending portion of the budget. The House GOP proposal is 1% annual increases after going all the way back to the spending level of 2022, and they have coupled raising the debt ceiling with some measures as moderate as they are sensible.
House Republicans’ most important provision is designed to partially revive the much diminished — the largely self-diminished — role of the legislative branch. It would combat the leakage of legislative branch responsibilities to the executive branch. It would require Congress to participate, more than it often wants to, in governing. The provision stipulates that all “major” regulations shall not go into effect until Congress takes responsibility by explicitly approving them. This assertion of congressional power would combat executive aggrandizement and somewhat reverse the marginalization of Congress.
Biden’s rhetoric has been called into question by many Americans. A critical mass of Americans probably has come to the conclusion that Biden does not mean what he says. The public’s cynicism does not matter much when he is just emitting noise about how the survival of what George Washington founded and Abraham Lincoln preserved now depends on him. However, his flapdoodle is important when he says that he will negotiate serious spending restraints and other reforms but only after Republicans forfeit their leverage regarding the debt ceiling.
Progressives’ unvarying agenda is to concentrate power in Washington, to concentrate Washington power in the executive branch, and to concentrate ever more of that power in administrative agencies that are effectively exempt from being accountable to people who are accountable to voters. Hence progressives’ impatience with the Constitution and its separation of powers. This rivalry between the branches usually gives each party the power to stymie the other sufficiently to compel compromise, unless the president considers this institutional architecture unreasonable, even unintelligible.
Ohio’s John Sherman (1823-1900), senator and secretary of state, warned us: “The Constitution provides for every accidental contingency in the executive — except a vacancy in the mind of the president.”
Original Story at www.normantranscript.com – 2023-05-21 07:30:00