President Bush and the 1990 national budget - 19 October 1990

All the western countries, all the democracies, certainly also all the dictatorships of the right, have in the past year come to agree on something that during the past 70 years has been hotly disputed around the globe. Namely that Communism is a failure as a system of government.

Among the world's leaders, apart from Mr Castro, I suppose only Mr Gorbachev cannot say so out loud. If only to avoid a massive revolt of the bureaucracies in the Soviet countries, Mr Gorbachev has still to go on pretending and, perhaps, meaning that what failed was the form of Communism they'd been practising. Too doctrinaire, too rigid, too unwilling to mix in what was good about a market system.

We know that at least two of the European countries have come right out and abolished the party and the name. Surely it's something for any politician, any clergyman, any one of us, to confess suddenly that the principles you've believed in since childhood, and on which you've tried to conduct your life, are false.

Imagine a whole nation doing this, and then finding itself wondering how you go about inventing a whole new system which will affect the way of life, the ways of work, of everybody from the president of the republic to the corner grocer.

Even to sense the bewilderment that millions of Soviet citizens must be feeling, you have to imagine that from next Monday on, your parliament, if you live under a parliamentary system, your parliament will be abolished. No more House of Commons, House of Lords. All the parliamentary seats throughout the country wiped out. In their place, what?

Very few of us, very few, I think, of the people hearing this talk live in a country which invented an entirely new system. Americans do, but they too, today, have to imagine the similar bewilderment of the men from the thirteen colonies who 200 years ago met in Philadelphia, after seven years of a form of self-government, a federation that had been a disastrous failure.

They sat down to invent a nation, and they did so. After many weeks of reviewing and debating the going systems, and they came up in the end with a republic and a written constitution which prescribes in detail, to this day, the powers and performance of every branch of government and then enumerates the liberties of the people that must be preserved.

Now, for the first time, in my time, serious voices are being raised in the Congress, in the serious press, saying that the system – the system, anyway, as it applies to the balance of powers between President and Congress, is unworkable. Now this is truly new.

Also, we hear from time to time from quite serious students of government regretting the creakiness of the federal system and wishing we had a parliamentary system. The former Senator Fulbright, for one, used to yearn for a parliamentary system.

But it was more wishing than seriously proposing abolishing the Constitution and starting all over. Nobody's suggesting that now, but what is new is the number of members of the Senate and the House who are saying that that part of the Constitution that prescribes the rules, the methods of running the country financially – I mean who can impose taxes and raise armies, and who can veto the Congress's plans, the president, that's who – that all this should be changed.

Why now? Because this year has seen, in an acute form, a damaging repeat performance of a chronic annual farce. The business of getting the president, the Senate and the House to agree on a national budget.

I talked – was it a week ago? – about the tiresome, dependable absurdity of the Congress squabbling and arguing for months on end about who shall pay for what and who shall take a cut? Debating through the nights up to and beyond 1 October which is the day when an old budget dies and the new one comes into being. So, as I said, they failed twice. Two different deadlines and the president, with furious reluctance, had to sign two emergency bills to pay the wages of all the government's employees. And now a third deadline is coming up.

During this grotesque, unending conflict, many men and women in the House and the Senate must have dreamed, in the few hours they had free, of that scene in the House of Commons every year, when the prime minister's budget director, as he'd be called here – the Chancellor of the Exchequer – presents the administration's – in effect the prime minister's – budget.

And the papers next morning say "2p on beer, 2% on value added, 3p on tobacco". How sublimely simple! Of course there'll be a debate but it won't, will it, go on for three, four months, at the end of which time the House has torn the Prime Minister's budget apart, written its own, sent it to the House of Lords.

They don't like it, start all over again, new House bill, PM won't accept it and the government shuts down for lack of money to run all its departments, from the foreign office to the man who polishes up the knocker on the big front door of 10 Downing Street.

The big, crude difference is that in a parliamentary country, a party comes into power, presents its programme, including the budget, puts it into law, maybe after a nasty, short debate and says, in effect, "If you don't like it, win the next election and you have a go!"

In this country, the Constitution dictates that not the president, not the Senate, but all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments, as with other bills. Nothing about the President.

So no budget that's going to be enacted can be passed without the approval of the House. It is, in the beginning and usually in the end, responsible for all money bills, whether for a petrol tax or a tariff, income tax, payment for old people in hospitals, or the money for sending 145,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf.

In practice, the president, in the spring, works out his budget, what he would like and unfortunately the press, the media around the world go into flaming headlines, "Reagan will double defence budget". "Bush refuses to soak the rich".

But these are only what he wants. And because the majority of the voters put him in the White House, presumably he represents what they want. So, it's true – no other single person has his powers of persuasion. And, again, the Constitution was terrified of giving too much power to either the president or the Congress. The president can veto a budget he doesn't like. But he'd better not be too cavalier about using it, especially Mr Bush, who faces a Democratic majority in the Senate and a huge Democratic majority in the House. And his veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote in both Houses.

Now, this year, there's another large snag that hampers the House, or rather tempts it to act not primarily in the national interest. This is an election year. Not of course presidential, but one third of the Senate's 100 seats are up for election and all 435 seats in the House.

Now, a member of the House, a congressman or woman, is elected for only two years and, by the time he's elected in November, the budget for the following year is already in place.

So the only budget he has anything to say about is the one that's in force in the year he's running for reelection. Therefore it's the only time he has a chance of proving to the folks back home that he's done something for them – not for the country at large.

The constituency of a congressman is not, like that of a senator, the whole state, it is a small, dense, very local constituency. And, for him, the immortal line, "What have you done for me lately?" doesn't mean did you vote for the F-28 bomber or aid to Eastern Europe.

It means, how about that subsidy you promised for our sugar beet crop? Or, that new bridge over the river, or, in all the towns close by army camps, why did you let the secretary of defence close it down and put 2,000 of your civilian constituents out of work? Fine congressman you are!! I'll remember you, come November!

Well, to draw the stark moral, a congressman in election year is under brutal pressure not to save money but to spend it. And in a year, this year, when the country is finally alarmed about the deficit and furious at the way the House and the Senate and the president go on swearing to cut 50 billions and seem totally impotent to do so.

So, the big hassle in the House has been over, "Let's cut the spending all across the board but not in my district!" That really is the impulse that stalls the engine of government today. Why did the framers of the Constitution give such decisive power to the House in all money matters in what, in every form of government, is at the heart of it, the budget?

Well, the men of Philadelphia were driven by one fear more than another. After their recent experience with an all-powerful king whose troops had acted as an occupying army in American trouble spots, they were determined, first, not to have a chief executive, whether he was a king, a president, a prime minister who could command the money to raise armies. Or, who could lay and collect taxes, duties, imports and excises, provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States. And if that sounds like a quotation, it is. Those are the powers specified in the Constitution as belonging exclusively to the House.

You could say that the most powerful man in either the House or the Senate is whoever happens to be chairman of the House appropriations committee. He, alone, can accept or reject a money bill, or freeze it in his committee.

The chairman of the House appropriations committee about 15, 20 years ago was a man from Arkansas named Wilbur Mills. And one year, he decided to run for the presidency.

His candidacy didn't last long but shortly after he'd announced, a friend called him up and moaned over the telephone, "Wilbur, Wilbur! Why do you want to give up all that power just to be President of the United States?"

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