Volume XIX, No.36

Around Washington you can tell football season is upon us (here you can read what we think about the NFL’s non-profit status) because Congress is lining up to punt their work until after the election. Lawmakers have a lot to do over the next month, but little will and even less incentive to do it. We’ll get to dealing with their main constitutionally mandated duty – funding government – later, but we’re looking at immigration issues, the still stumbling economy, Russia/Ukraine, dealing with the insurgents in Iraq (the so called ISIS – Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), and companies taking advantage of the tax code with inversions.

All of these issues, even funding government, require leadership. But what we will get in the run up to the election will be little more than pandering to the base. Both sides will talk past the crisis that is minor immigrant children at the border. After telling each other it is their fault, both parties are advocating “solutions” to ISIS, which amounts to basically spending money to deal with the threat, without any real plan for success or what’s next. And with each month we hear of companies that are contemplating purchasing foreign companies and shifting their headquarters overseas to take advantage of lower tax codes, but Congress doesn’t seem exorcised enough to do anything about it.

Where is Congress? Asleep at the switch? More like with their finger in the wind. No one wants to do anything that might provide fodder for the other side to take advantage and gain a few extra House seats or even more importantly, wrest/retain control of the Senate from the opposite party. So there may be a few votes and speeches for the base, but then lawmakers will quickly retreat to their districts to try to hold onto their jobs in the 114^th Congress.

And so Congress fiddles while the spending house burns. Congress has one constitutionally mandated job each year: pass the spending bills to keep government running. There are a dozen spending bills and 12 “work” days scheduled in September, but it is unlikely that even one of them will be enacted. So far this year, the House has passed seven spending bills and the Senate a grand total of zero. That is an equation for a continuing resolution (CR). A CR would allow spending at last year’s levels into the new fiscal year, probably until December, after the election.

There is no excuse for this. Lawmakers knew what the top line defense and non-defense discretionary spending levels for fiscal year 2015 were since the end of last year! They already knew how much they were going to spend and they had nine months to figure out how.

CRs are not victimless. They tie the hands of agencies who don’t know what their budget will be next year, whether they can upgrade aging computers, travel, or hire new staff. They take away the opportunity to cut programs that are unnecessary, and preclude directing tax dollars to programs that work particularly well  or save taxpayer dollars. CRs guarantee inefficiency and waste. For lawmakers who like to bash government it’s kind of perfect. Congress doesn’t do its job, which makes it hard for the agencies to do theirs and lawmakers get to bash them for being wasteful and inefficient.

Here’s a novel thought for Congress. Coming back from recess roll up your sleeves and do the job that you got elected to do. Don’t fritter away the time, in fact see this as your audition to the electorate in November.