Rep. Buck op-ed: We must end the era of crisis-driven spending bills
By Rep. Ken Buck • 10/28/15 1:47 PM
President Obama and lame duck Speaker John Boehner effectively ended sequester in their debt-ceiling, crisis-driven budget deal, and even the presumptive incoming speaker agrees that "the process stinks."
Rather than the House having a real discussion about spending priorities as the framers of the Constitution intended, President Obama and the speaker created a closed-door deal that ends the only effective constraint on government growth to come out of the past four years.
The deal increases the debt limit, adds $80 billion in new spending (which it promises to pay back in a decade), cuts the crop insurance program, sells some of our strategic petroleum reserve and raids the Social Security retirement benefits program to bolster the flailing Disability Insurance Program.
Hardly the result that voters expected after Republicans asked for their trust in 2010. We proudly decried autocratic government in "A Pledge to America," writing:
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Noah got pretty lucky with the news cycle and landed jokes about John Boehner, the pope, and water on Mars.
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"An unchecked executive, a compliant legislature, and an overreaching judiciary have combined to thwart the will of the people and overturn their votes and their values, striking down long-standing laws and institutions and scorning the deepest beliefs of the American people.
An arrogant and out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites makes decisions, issues mandates, and enacts laws without accepting or requesting the input of the many."
We must end the era of crisis-driven spending bills in which President Obama's agenda gets funded, the debt ceiling leaps higher and the House of Representatives votes on the final bill without holding a single hearing on the legislation.
This process is far from what the Founders intended and makes a mockery of the House's Article One "power of the purse" authority.
The process stinks, because the House allows it to stink.
I've had enough, which is why I founded the Article One Caucus in the House of Representatives — to build consensus around restoring the rightful place at the table of the legislative branch of government.
This Caucus will push back against executive overreach. The president has issued amnesty to illegal immigrants, increased the minimum wage for federal contractors, ignored Affordable Care Act deadlines and now negotiated his preferred budget deal. Congress should have a say in all of these actions.
We will have a new speaker, and that new speaker needs to wipe the slate clean. No more last-minute, secret, backroom deals that cut elected representatives, and by extension the people, out of the discussion.
The process has become so rotten that it is impossible to reconcile it with the fundamental precept of our nation: That we are a republic in which the will of the people is represented most closely by the House of Representatives.
Instead, we have devolved into a government that lurches from crisis to crisis with virtually absolute power vested in the speaker, leaving the rest of the members as mere lights on the voting tally to affirm whatever deal, no matter how noxious, that has been cut.
Our nation deserves to have a real discussion about our $19 trillion national debt. Yet, in the current debt deal, we are denied that. Our nation deserves to have a discussion about what the national budget should be every year. Yet, in the current debt deal, we are denied that. And yes, our nation deserves to have a discussion about how the Social Security Disability Fund has been decimated by fraud, waste and abuse, leaving it teetering on bankruptcy. Yet, once again, we are denied that.
Restoring Congress' Article One powers is essential to restoring faith in our system of government. After this latest debt deal, the people rightfully should be questioning what their elected representatives in Congress are doing, and why they are not standing up for the Constitution.
I urge my colleagues to join me in demanding that the change in the speakership serve as a new beginning for re-establishing the rightful role of the House. With public trust of Congress at catastrophic lows, failure to reassert our authority is not an option, it is an imperative.
Now is the time to restore Article One of the U.S. Constitution, before Congress becomes nothing more or less than a rubber stamp to policies which we neither agreed to nor accept.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rep.-buck-op-ed-we-must-end-the-era-of-crisis-driven-spending-bills/article/2575106
