The House Appropriations Committee is expected to vote April 16 on a “supplemental” spending bill to provide funds for the war in Iraq.
There was a time when such supplemental bills were called “emergency” spending measures, because an end run around the yearly appropriations process was supposed to happen only when unpredictable events — hurricanes, tornadoes, sudden foreign crises — made it necessary for the federal government to act quickly.
But now Congress routinely plans to shove certain spending into supplemental appropriations bills.
Never mind that “routine” and “plan” are nonsensical when describing emergencies.
These days, any time Congress wants to pay for something without being constrained by ordinary budget limits, it dumps the items into a supplemental bill without regard to the bill’s main purpose.
A senior Democratic leadership aide told CongressDaily last week that this new bill to pay for the Iraq war “will probably include more domestic spending than earlier war-funding bills. The domestic spending would allow Democrats to address unmet needs in an election year and would attract votes for the package.”
In other words, watch your wallets. Federal spending is about to spin even more out of control. What’s worse, CongressDaily reports, “the White House has not addressed what level of domestic spending President Bush would accept in the supplemental measure.”
In other words, the question isn’t whether he’ll accept any unrelated spending, but just how much.
That’s a little like trying to stop a drug habit by taking two shots of heroin rather than three.
Back in 1995, when Congress was serious about protecting taxpayers by balancing the budget, then-Appropriations Chairman Bob Livingston not only ruled out any nonemergency spending on supplemental bills, but also required that all the emergency spending be offset by savings in other parts of the federal budget.
In short, an emergency was treated not as an excuse to break the bank, but as a reason to insist even more on honest accounting. Alas, that admirable self-discipline has been replaced with a free-lunch ethic that will drive the budget deeper into the red.
