You couldn’t tell by the business-as-usual happenings on Capitol Hill these days. Democrats won a majority by promising to clean up the mess in Congress, but it’s hard to find much that has changed, especially in the area of honesty about federal spending.
Consider Section 511, an obscure little provision sneaked into law at the last minute by the outgoing GOP majority last year at the suggestion of the Joint Committee on Taxation. Congress needed an additional $7 billion in revenue for budget purposes. Somebody at JCT said “have county governments withhold three percent on their payment whenever a local bureaucrat buys a screwdriver or a load of concrete.” The Internal Revenue Service is already supposed to collect such a tax from businesses selling to local governments, but has botched the job, for whatever reason. The idea was adopted because JCT estimated it would generate the needed $7 billion, which was then counted toward the current budget, even though counties weren’t required to start collecting the tax until 2011.
In the private sector, this kind of accounting is often called “fraud.” In Congress, it’s called “the budget reconciliation process,” after a 1974 law intended to impose enough financial discipline on senators and congressmen to force them to balance — or “reconcile” — revenues and spending. Instead, reconciliation has encouraged Congress to do all kinds of accounting tricks like Section 511 that count revenue as here today even if won’t exist until tomorrow. We agree with the National Association of Counties that Section 511 ought to be repealed.
In fact, all Section 511-type sleights-of-hand ought to be repealed, but we’re not confident Democrats will see things that way. They’ve made some progress, but the closer we look at the lobbying bill moving through Congress the more loopholes we see. USA Today reports that universities, colleges and other higher education groups spent $75 million in 2005 lobbying Congress, often for earmarks — anonymous, unaccountable spending congressmen put into spending bills or committee reports. There was $2 billion worth of higher-education earmarks in 2003, the last year for which data was available, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Senate Democrats’ lobbying reform bans lobbyists from paying for congressional meals but guess what the bill exempts? Lobbying by higher education, including paying for congressional travel. Why? Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., explains: “I can do a $2 million earmark to a New York university and then they can give money through their friends to my campaign, but they can’t buy me a $20 dinner.”
Like the Section 511 nonsense of the GOP majority in 2006, exempting universities from lobbying reform gives lie to Democrat claims in 2007 that they are serious about changing the culture of corruption in Washington. Why can’t all the politicians just tell us the whole truth?
