Congress is failing in its duty to pass a workable budget

Congress is failing in its duty to pass a workable budget

To its discredit, the Democratic Congress is no further along in meeting its budget obligations this year than the outgoing Republican Congress was at this time last year.

President Bush is correct to berate Congress for its failures. His criticism would have far more weight had he just once in the first six years of his tenure held Republicans to the same standard.

Likewise, it is within the president’s power to veto spending bills that he considers excessive. It is only too bad that he didn’t veto a single Republican spending bill at a time when the national debt was increasing at what should have been seen as an alarming rate.

The national debt when President Bush took office was $5.7 trillion. Today it stands at $9.1 trillion, an increase of 60 percent under the president’s watch. And it is growing at a rate of about $1,000 a second, or $1.4 billion every day — most of that in interest, some of it because the president continues to submit and Congress continues to approve budgets that call for the government to spend more money than it will collect.

The debt, which is held by millions of Americans who have bonds or treasury bills, by foreign investors and governments and by the U.S. government itself, which has borrowed against Social Security taxes, now totals more than $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the nation.

It’s growing regardless

Realistically, nothing the Congress or this president does over the next year is going to materially affect the size of the national debt. In fact, between interest costs, more projected deficit spending in the new budget and off-budget expenditures for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the national debt could hit the $10 trillion mark by the time Bush leaves office.

That said, nothing good can come of Congress and President Bush failing to reach a reasonable compromise on the budget. With the dollar already shaky on the world market, with imports continuing to flood American stores and with the cost of oil and other energy steadily rising, it is important for the United States to show the rest of the world that the very least it can do is pass a budget.

Last year, the lame-duck Republican Congress abrogated its budget responsibilities in a blatant political maneuver designed to bog down the incoming Democratic Congress.

House Democrats worked around that by taking the continuing resolution that was passed at year’s end by the Republicans, tweaking it and sending it to the Senate for approval as the final $463.5 billion federal funding measure for the rest of the fiscal year.

Unfulfilled pledge

Then they pledged to do better. Which they haven’t.

Of the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government’s operations each year, Congress has passed only two — and Bush vetoed one of those because of what he saw as excessive spending on children’s health care. All 12 bills were supposed to have been passed by Oct. 1, the start of the federal fiscal year. In the meantime, the government operates on the Democrat’s continuing resolutions.

Funding for the war is being held hostage to the Democrats’ need to respond to their constituents, who are opposed to continuing the war in Iraq, by Senate Republican filibusters of any war funding bill that places even the hint of deadline for withdrawing troops and by President Bush’s threat to veto any bill that he believes limits his power as commander in chief.

This is a dangerous political game in which each side is accusing the other of putting American troops in greater danger. The problem for congressional Democrats is that the president doesn’t have anything to lose politically. He’s in a better position to gamble politically than they are. The problem for congressional Republicans is that if the president loses, they’ll be the ones who pay the political price.

The national debt is frightening, playing politics over the war in Iraq is a disgrace and the refusal of Democrats and Republicans to put the good of the nation over partisanship is a scandal.