Congress's Broken Windows

The president must have power over the budget to make spending reform work.

By Daniel Henninger
WSJ.com

Here's something most Republicans don't want to hear: There is no way the born-again, straight and sober Republicans of the 112th Congress are going to get spending under control unless they involve the fellow at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The spending reforms that Speaker John Boehner and his counterinsurgency lieutenants have proposed—spending reductions to offset any mandatory increases or stated budget limits for the current fiscal year—are terrific. But if you think Congress, by itself, is going to sustain this discipline over time, I have a bridge in Alaska I'd like to sell you.

Congress is a legislative body. Like legislative bodies from ancient Rome till now, its DNA is not to forgo things but to do stuff. Everyone agrees that Congress holds something called the "power of the purse." And don't they know it. Nowhere in the Constitution will you find that phrase. Nor in the Constitution that they are reading on the House floor Thursday will you hear the words "spend," "programs" or "outlays." All this, though, is what Congress has been about since anyone can remember.

The reform groups and blogosphere are threatening hellfire for any Republicans who cross them on spending, but take my word for it: Once any Congress makes it to the budgeting "out years," all that hellfire will be just a puff of smoke. James Buchanan, the father of public choice theory, won a Nobel Prize for unraveling this reality.

It is not hopeless. The locus of hope, however, lies with the Executive, a word at least nominally associated with responsibility. In an article on these pages recently ("Time for Emergency Economic Reform"), a successful political executive, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, identified the sine-qua-non reform to sustain spending discipline: presidential impoundment power.

However you define the idea—impoundment, rescission, the line-item veto—it is the power of a president or governor to zero out some of the spending pile that a legislature dumps on the front lawn. It is executive pushback against wretched legislative excess.

"Presidents once had the authority," Mr. Daniels wrote, "to spend less than Congress made available through appropriation. On reflection, nothing else makes sense."

Ask New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie about the impoundment power. He has it, and he'll tell you it is indispensable to what he is trying to do in his hopelessly profligate state. Absent that impoundment power, a lot of the Christie pitch would be just rhetoric.

Before getting into why 43 governors, but not the U.S. president, have this power, a comment on those who say that impoundment is a pop-gun, that it can't control entitlements or mega-programs.

Perhaps you have heard of the "broken windows" theory of urban chaos. It says that in a neighborhood wracked with murder and mayhem, it is important to repair broken windows. The idea is that leaving small matters like broken windows unrepaired tells criminals that no one cares if they break the neighborhood further, and it tells the people there is no hope of fixing the big things. In New York City, this worked.

Earmarks, pork, corporate carve-outs and all that are Congress's broken windows.

Every knowing article written on this subject points out what a "small" percentage of spending this stuff is. But the behavioral incentives for big-time criminals in the Bronx and big-time spenders in a legislature like Congress are the same. An annual federal budget of $3.5 trillion is a towering monument of broken windows. Federal highway spending has been on automatic pilot for nearly 20 years. Sen. Tom Coburn has a long list of programs uselessly duplicated across the government; nine agencies run 69 early-education programs.

Here is a list of U.S. presidents and public figures who have used or supported the impoundment power: Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton, the Bushes, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore, Pat Buchanan, Jeb Hensarling, Russ Feingold, Joe Lieberman, Judd Gregg, and not least both Paul Ryan, the new House Budget chairman, and Barack Obama.

This crucial executive ballast does not exist mainly for two reasons.

In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon tried aggressively to impound spending, touching off a war with Congress's "prerogatives." Then Watergate broke. In a fury, one of the most liberal Congresses passed the Budget Control Act of 1974 (which should be repealed). It transferred most spending "control" to Congress, which one commentator at the time called "congressional government—and chaos."

Second, the Constitution is ambiguous on how to divide this authority, and the Supreme Court, in coin-flip decisions, has sided with Congress.

All the congressional names above, especially Rep. Ryan, have tried to thread this legal needle. But it doesn't exist because the bipartisan pig-out caucus—in hiding now—won't let it happen.

Yes, this week the GOP Congress is talking about a lollapalooza annual budget cut of $100 billion. Go for it! But let's hear Barack Obama put the impoundment power back in play in his State of the Union address—for this presidency and however many presidents are left in the future of our broken-windows capital.

Write to henninger@wsj.com