Redstate

By Adam C2 Posted in Economy — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

It's common knowledge that the written budget in Congress is not usually followed by the end of the year. This year, however, a group of House conservatives have taken a step toward enforcing the original budget constraints. Recently, many House conservatives have grown increasingly concerned with an inability to raise budget points of order (the key procedural tool to enforce the budget) as they do in the Senate. The Republican Study Committee, a policy group made up of the more ideologically conservative members, fought for this right back in March (.pdf) when the budget was being written. It was hailed as a success for good government and a step away from the convoluted budget practices that Congress is notorious for pursuing. It fit perfectly with the Republican Revolution in 1994 which put good, honest government practices as the highest priority and knew that those practices would lead to smaller government.

Typically in the House, the rules governing consideration of each spending bill will end up waiving all points of order against the bill and therefore strip members of their ability to enforce the budget. Members could vote against the rule, but House Leadership has drilled it into them that this is unacceptable and thus it rarely happens. Reps. Pence, Hensarling, and Flake,(all RSC members) came up with the idea of "point of order protection" and secured a marginal victory by gaining a modified version of it from House Leadership. The one modification being that they could not use it on conference reports.

Now along come the first two appropriations conference reports, and they violated the budget (although not by much). They included the Interior and Environment Appropriations and the Legislative Branch Appropriations. So, House Leadership puts rules on the floor waiving the points of order against these bills as was normal practice before the RSC secured "point of order protection." This was unsurprising since even the marginal victory by the RSC allowed leadership to waive these points of order on conference reports. But then a bit of a surprise took place.

To put leadership on notice, 23 Republican members (enough to bring down a rule on a party line vote) voted "present" which serves as a form of abstaining. This let the House Leadership know that they would not sanction throwing the budget out the window to allow excessive spending increases. Although the amounts are small, the statement is clear. These 23 Republicans are making a statement that the principle is more important than House Leadership thinks it is. We make a budget; we should stick to it. For this act of principle, I want to thank the following 23 House Republicans (which includes 7 freshmen):

Akin

Barrett (SC)

Bartlett (MD)

Flake

Foxx

Franks (AZ)

Garrett (NJ)

Gohmert

Gutknecht

Hefley

Hensarling

Jones (NC)

King (IA)

Lungren, Daniel E.

Marchant

Miller (FL)

Otter

Pence

Price (GA)

Ryan (WI)

Sodrel

Tancredo

Westmoreland

Hopefully their efforts will remind House Leadership that following the budget is the right thing to do.