Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 25, 1993 TAG: 9309060226
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN GREENBERG
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In the course of six or eight weeks, legislators will approve bills appropriating more than half a trillion dollars in spending for fiscal year 1994. If recent history is any guide, most members of Congress won't even read much of the legislation that appropriates these funds.
Soon after that, the House and Senate likely will embark on a pre-holiday legislative orgy, approving scores of bills in the course of a few days. Without even a scorecard to tell what is being voted on, members will be forced to rely on lobbyists and party leaders for a thumbs up or down before casting votes. Only after the bills are passed into law will the public find out that much of this high-speed spending was unjustified.
If ``Mr. Smith'' came to Washington today, he might think lawmaking had become a bit rushed. And if he got the idea that something fishy was being hurried by before anyone could get a good look at it, he would be absolutely right. Congress needs to slow down and debate the bills before it spends the taxpayers' money.
Congressional rules require minimum review periods of two and three days, respectively, before appropriations bills can be voted up or down in the Senate and before a vote on any bill in the House. These rules need to be enforced. But waiting periods have increasingly been waived, ignored or bypassed in recent years. Under unanimous-consent agreements, the Senate often pulls bills just out of committee immediately onto the Senate floor. The House routinely waives its three-day rules.
Just one of many examples is the $151 billion 1991 highway authorization bill, which was brought to a vote on the House floor before any member had gotten a chance to read it. No copy of the bill existed when floor debate began. An hour after a copy was pieced together from different word-processing machines and brought to the House floor, the bill was overwhelmingly approved without a single member having so much as leafed through it.
What was in the highway bill? Weeks after the vote, Department of Transportation staffers were still wading through a pork-laden monster, discovering new, expensive spending projects members had inserted for their home districts and rushed through before the fat could be cut.
In most cases, the only reason for rushing the legislative process is to hurry pork-barrel spending through before anyone sees it or to cut short debate on other politically controversial proposals.
Committee secrecy aids this process. House and Senate rules generally require committees to hold open meetings. But the House Committees on Appropriations and Ways and Means frequently conduct secret bill-writing sessions. And though the Senate Appropriations Committee opens its meetings to the public, the meeting room is so small that only a handful of outsiders are allowed in.
Worst of all, though conference committees are supposed to work out differences between existing House and Senate versions of a bill in the open, they frequently meet in secret. Lawmakers add completely new material that hasn't been agreed to by either house of Congress, in complete violation of the rules. Even bills relatively free of pork when they pass the House and Senate can be loaded up with wasteful spending in a conference committee.
For example, the Senate proposed spending roughly $125 million on a Housing and Urban Development ``Special Purpose Grants'' fund for fiscal year 1993, while the House allocated no such funding at all. When the conference committee met in secret, it didn't compromise. It added $135 million to the Senate's $125 million.
The resulting $260 million appropriation included $1.3 million for two sugar-cane mills in Hawaii and $1.5 million each for a ``manufacturing incubator facility'' in North Dakota, renovation of two county courthouses in Alabama, small-business loan funds in Vermont, a ``Center for Pacific Rim Studies'' at the University of San Francisco, and a video-conferencing facility at a private business in South Carolina.
It's hard to see why local governments, private universities and businesses should be subsidized by the federal government. But it is easy to explain why Congress routinely waives mandated waiting periods before votes on such spending boondoggles: Too-close scrutiny would jeopardize their prospects of passage.
Congress must abide by its own rules. It should enforce the waiting period - and even extend it to five days before a vote can be taken on spending bills. Maybe then we can all get a look at the pork before it hits the frying pan.
\ Dan Greenberg is an analyst for the U.S. Congress Assessment Project at The Heritage Foundation in Washington.
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