The Reformers: Last year's appropriations nightmare has congressional leaders eager to overhaul the budget process. By David Baumann Still livid over last year's budget disaster, in which the House and Senate ended up combining several appropriations measures into a huge and highly unpopular omnibus spending bill, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are vowing to overhaul the budget process. The effort could gain support from the Clinton administration, which has favored budget reform proposals in the past. But translating all this support into a consensus that would make budget reform a reality may not be easy. Not only are myriad reform proposals floating around, but each of the proposals attacks someone's turf-creating instant opposition. Two factors could help drive the passage of proposed budget reforms that have gone nowhere in the past: Nobody wants a repeat of 1998, and Republicans want to change budget law that will, at the very least, pave the way for a tax cut. "Last year's process is the poster child for reform," says Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, a leader of a House bipartisan task force on budget reform created last year. Last year, the House and Senate never agreed to a budget resolution. That slowed down the appropriations process. Moreover, to the chagrin of Republicans, it meant that tax cuts weren't protected from a filibuster and thus were virtually impossible to pass. Having failed to pass eight of the 13 annual spending bills by Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, Congress was forced to pass six short-term continuing resolutions to keep the agencies operating. A small group of congressional leaders and the White House hammered out a $487 billion omnibus spending bill that few members liked, but which most voted for so they could leave town and campaign for reelection. Democrats complained about the process; Republicans complained that they were forced to give the White House and congressional Democrats billions of dollars in new spending to close the deal on the omnibus bill. That won't happen again, Republicans vow. "We have an obligation to pass all the appropriation bills by this summer," new House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., told colleagues after accepting the gavel Jan. 6. "We will not leave this chamber until we do." Similar promises have gone unfulfilled in the past. Senate Proposals On the Senate side, leaders are moving on two fronts-legislation and changes to the chamber's rules. The most wide-ranging proposal comes from Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who has renewed his push for two-year budgeting. The bill has the support of Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Fred Thompson, R-Tenn. A Thompson aide says the bill will be a priority for Thompson, whose committee passed it in the 105th Congress. In September, 37 senators wrote to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Minority Leader Tom Daschle asking them to move the bill early in the 106th Congress. "The annual appropriations and budget process increasingly dominates the congressional agenda and we regularly fail to meet our deadlines," the Senators said in their letter. "The result is that we spin our wheels, all at the expense of careful deliberation by the Senate on oversight of existing programs and consideration of legislation." The Domenici plan would require the President to submit a two-year budget during the first year of a congressional session. Congress would adopt a two-year budget resolution and two-year appropriations bills. Congress would devote its second year to oversight of federal programs. The bill also tightens the definition of "emergencies," allowing senators to challenge emergency spending by requiring 60 votes for its approval-making it more difficult to exceed budget caps. It also would institute an automatic continuing resolution to keep agencies open if Congress does not complete its appropriations bills and shortens the debate time for budget resolutions. And a Senate rule prohibiting legislative proposals from being added to appropriations bills, abandoned in 1995, would be reinstated. Without a two-year budget, it has become virtually impossible for Congress to meet its deadlines, Domenici said in an interview. "I don't understand why we don't try it," he said. The Clinton administration has supported the idea in the past. "Biennial budgeting offers the potential to contribute to the enhanced performance of our government," then-OMB Director Franklin Raines told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1997. Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review proposed moving to a two-year budget. "With regard to agency management, it is plausible to expect that moving from annual budget preparation to a biennial cycle would free up some time in the second year of the biennium for program managers to increase their efforts at management and long-range planning," Raines said. But two-year budgeting has some powerful opponents-the appropriators-whose power would be diluted by changing to a two-year funding cycle. The Domenici plan is a "solution without a problem," former House Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Livingston, R-La., told National Journal's Congress Daily in November. Two-year budgeting only changes the way Congress deals with appropriations, he said, contending that the real problem is growth of entitlement programs. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., a former House Appropriations Committee member, made a similar argument when the legislation came before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee during the 105th Congress. "There is no more effective way to focus the attention of federal program administrators than to have their budgets at stake," Durbin wrote in a minority report when the committee passed the bill. Appropriators also have argued that a two-year cycle would increase the need to pass supplemental spending bills during the years in which annual funding bills are not passed. A House Appropriations Committee aide calls that an "insurmountable task." Domenici, an appropriator himself, said that has not been proven. In addition to the Domenici bill, Lott introduced on the opening day of the 106th Congress several Senate rule changes on emergency spending, decreasing debate time for budget resolutions and prohibiting the addition of legislative provisions to funding measures. In the House House members have been preparing their own budget reforms. Even before last year's budget debacle, House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, appointed a bipartisan task force to propose reforms. This year, Nussle wants to renew the plan he developed with Rep. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., another task force leader. That plan would require Congress to send the President a budget plan for his signature. If the President chooses not to sign it, Congress would pass a budget as it does now. The purpose, Nussle said, is to ensure that spending fights occur earlier in the year. "It forces confrontation to the earliest stages of the budget process, leaving quality time for legislating details," he said. The proposal also would create an automatic continuing resolution, clarify Budget Act provisions that might be interpreted as preventing Congress from using budget surpluses for tax cuts and establish a reserve fund for budget emergencies. Nussle said that many Senators are not opposed to the ideas in his plan, adding that he is willing to explore the idea of two-year budgeting. Another veteran of the budget reform wars, House Republican Conference Chairman Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., will reintroduce his bill to force Congress and the administration to cut a budget deal early in the year by requiring a presidential signature on the budget. The budget simply would be a one-page document establishing spending ceilings in broad categories. Other budget reform ideas circulating in the House have to do with changing the way the budget moves through committees. "The budget process rewards liars," argues Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. He says the Budget Act allows the budget committees to pass "macro" numbers that later can be abandoned. He renewed his suggestion to transform the budget committees into a joint subcommittee of the Ways and Means and Appropriations committees. A House Democratic aide says the Budget Committee should be a "leadership" committee that directs the process. He agrees that the current process allows members to talk out of both sides of their mouth. People who were seeking projects as part of last year's massive highway bill were later pushing for cuts in discretionary spending, this aide says. Congress must find some way to "impose some discipline on the system," says a senior aide to the House Appropriations Committee. The aide suggests that forcing the President to sign a budget resolution would guarantee that the administration stays engaged on spending issues throughout the year. Another set of reform proposals that would strengthen the Appropriations Committee came from Livingston. He said that all work on a budget resolution should be completed by April 30, after which appropriators could begin work on their bills, even if a budget plan had not been adopted. He said the Speaker should insist that the Senate agree to the House's expedited schedule and that if one house failed to pass a funding bill by July 30, the bill that the other house passed should be the starting point for any conference. Livingston withdrew his proposals when he decided to run for Speaker himself. One budget analyst is skeptical that any reforms will be adopted, citing the lack of agreement. Republicans are most likely to concentrate on changing budget rules to affirm their ability to use the budget surplus on tax cuts, says Stanley Collender, managing director of the federal budget consulting group at Fleishman-Hillard Inc. "There's never a perfect time," Nussle admits, adding that such institutional changes always will face "10 hurdles." He contends, however, that the idea of over-hauling the process will be a "very high priority for the Budget Committee," arguing that last year's budget train wreck will focus attention on the need for reform. Government Executive, March 1999.
A Case of Supermajority Fever By Alan Ehrenhalt Not long ago, a real estate developer went to the city council in Naples, Florida, with a proposition he didn't think it could possibly refuse. An old post office was sitting empty downtown, becoming more of an eyesore every day. The developer, Gary Galleberg, wanted to take up some of the concrete in front of the building, plant trees, create a courtyard and set up a design studio. He would benefit; the community would benefit. But the plan needed a zoning variance. The council debated it, called the roll, and when it was all over there were four votes in favor of the plan and three against. Permission was denied. That's correct. It was denied. According to a law that took effect in Naples at the beginning of this year, any zoning decision required approval by a supermajority-five votes out of seven, or 71.4 percent. And three members of the council insisted that the plan was flawed because the four parking spaces called for in Galleberg's design didn't meet official requirements for a building that size at a downtown location. This was a pretty strange objection, as the four-member council majority patiently tried to explain. True, a post office is a large building, but a design studio just doesn't attract that many visitors. Forcing the developer to meet strict parking standards based on square footage was a pointless display of bureaucratic pettiness. "Nobody ever imagined it would get turned down," says Councilman Peter Van Arsdale, one of the project's supporters. "It was just crazy." The primary victim of this exercise wasn't the developer. If the city council really preferred an eyesore to an art studio, Galleberg told them, that was all right with him. He would go somewhere else. The real loser was the community. Naples was the victim of its own procedural reform that allowed a misguided minority to exercise a veto over common sense. I learned about this event from the excellent reporting of Brent Batten, who covered it for the Naples Daily News. But there's a larger point to the story, one that extends far beyond the concerns of a single Florida town, and beyond the technicalities of zoning law. The point is that supermajority requirements are almost always a bad idea. Any legislative body that adopts them-from a city council to a national assembly-is asking for trouble. This is a good time to raise the issue, because in the past year or so, politicians all over the country have contracted a bad case of supermajority fever. Mostly it has to do with taxes. Tom Ridge ran for reelection as governor of Pennsylvania last year on a platform calling for a two-thirds requirement on any proposal to increase state taxes. Christine Todd Whitman wants a two-thirds rule in New Jersey, as does John Engler in Michigan. Iowa's GOP leadership has placed a three-fifths rule on the ballot for this spring, and the Nebraska legislature is considering one. It isn't exclusively a Republican issue. Minnesota's Jesse Ventura is thinking along the same lines. "The governor likes any idea," an aide recently explained, "that would make it harder to raise taxes." Any idea at all? I think I can help him out here. The legislature could vote to make tax increases a federal offense, punishable by fine or imprisonment, or maybe both. That'd teach those liberals to keep their greasy hands off the people's money. The real question, however, is why an idea as dubious as supermajorities would pop up in so many diverse places at the same time. One answer is that it's a relatively easy way to pander the electorate, especially if you are a governor running for reelection. But a more important answer is that the supermajority scheme has been the object of an endless propaganda barrage by organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, neither of which see any harm in changing the rules of American democracy to help enact their chosen agendas. Pared down to its essentials, the position of these groups amounts to this: Anything we favor should be allowed to pass by majority vote. Anything we oppose needs at least two-thirds. They don't say this, of course. What they do is publish reams of statistical material purporting to demonstrate that the world would be a much better place if legislative bodies could be stripped of their ability to set fiscal policy by majority vote. One such study, issued a couple of years ago, looks at seven states that have had supermajority tax-writing rules for an extended period of time, and finds that five of the seven grew their economies faster than the national average between 1980 and 1992. In the view of the Heritage Foundation, "there is no escaping the logical relationship between supermajorities and superior state performance." In fact, you don't have to be Houdini to escape this one in about 10 seconds. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in rebuttal, tinkering with the time period under the study gives you a completely different result. Between 1979 and 1989, most of the supermajority states actually had lower-than-average growth. Not only that, but combined state and local taxes went up in most of them-mainly because local property-tax rates were rising to make up for what the state wasn't willing to spend. But the crucial argument against supermajorities doesn't come out of any debate over the minutiae of state economic performance. It comes out of the utter illogic of the concept itself. There are many issues I feel just as strongly about as the Heritage Foundation does about tax increases. Abortion, for example. I would be troubled by any new law extending legalized abortion any further. Maybe I'm unreasonable, maybe not. But either way, I have no right to demand that my legislature muster two-thirds in order to pass such a law, just because I oppose it. American democracy is based on majority rule. If 51 percent vote against me, my job is to try to change their minds-not cook the books so I can stop them with 33 percent. Are there situations where supermajority makes sense? Yes, a few. As a matter of fact, we've just been through one in Washington. If you watched even a few minutes of the congressional debate over impeachment, you probably understood why the framer didn't want to let a narrow majority nullify an election result and turn a president out of office for partisan reasons. The core safeguards of our democratic system are fragile and precious, and it's perfectly legitimate to want to place some kind of supermajority fence around them. But the minute you try to stretch this notion beyond its narrow protective category, you are on very thin logical ice. You wind up with absurdities like the situation that prevails all the time on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where any bloc of 40 senators can declare a filibuster and require the majority to obtain 60 votes to cut off debate and pass almost any bill. The Senate no longer legislates by majority rule; due to intentional misuse of its debating procedures, it operates under a three-fifths supermajority rule that in fact leaves it hostage to minority dictatorship. This is why most of the original Clinton domestic policy agenda never passed during the first two years of his term. On the merits, I think that's probably just as well. But it wasn't fair. When it happens to a Republican president, maybe as early as two years from now, quite a few of the anti-Clinton filibuster hawks of 1993 will get an education in the unjust facts of supermajority life. Fortunately, no other legislature in America has rules of procedure as silly as the those that prevail on the Senate floor. But quite a few of them impose a supermajority rule for one purpose or another, nearly always with unpleasant results. For the past 65 years, California law has required that the state budget receive the votes of two-thirds of both the Assembly and the Senate in order to be enacted into law. This was a Depression-era rule designed to prevent the legislature from spending scarce resources. If it did that, it might be worth keeping. In fact, it does precisely the opposite. Obtaining two-thirds is so difficult that the budget writers have to make sleazy side deals with individual members who demand special favors for special interests as their price for going along. "The recent budget negotiations in Sacramento," a bipartisan citizens commission concluded last year, "have been a sorry example of the pork-barrel spending that has become a regular feature of achieving the necessary two-thirds votes." The commission recommended repealing the requirement and going back to the old-fashioned majority rule. Whether California will have the courage to do this, I don't know. I
am certain that the U.S. Senate won't. On the other hand, I also know that
common sense does occasionally prevail. A few weeks ago, declaring that
a mistake had been made, four members of the Naples City Council announced
their intention to repeal the supermajority rule after less than two months
on the books. (Yes, they can do that by simple majority.) The council also
reversed itself on the post-office project and told Gary Galleberg he could
start anytime he wanted to.
Governing magazine, April 1999. Copyright 1999 by Governing magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Washington House Tied, But Not in Knots Co-speakers in the Evergreen State are meeting the challenge of their 49-49 tie with cooperation, civility and creativity. By David Ammons The odd-looking gavel came down with a loud thwack. Clyde Ballard, a conservative Republican from a rural district, and Frank Chopp, a liberal Democrat from downtown Seattle, each wielded one of the gavel's two handles. It was awkward and funny at the same time as they tried their first moment of power sharing. They broke out laughing. The bit of theater on opening day of Washington's 56th Legislature in January was an apt reminder of the challenges that face the state House of Representatives for the next two years. They're all tied up 49-49, after a surprising Democratic surge in November dropped the Republicans from a tidy 57-41 majority into the tie. It is only the second time in state history that the state has had a co-majority-or no majority, if you prefer-in the chamber. The pundits had correctly forecast that the state Senate would flip to the Democrats, but few had paid attention to the party's possibilities in the House. After the last absentees were counted in four tight races, the tie was confirmed-the political equivalent of flipping a coin and having it land on edge. After four years of divided government-with a Democratic governor and Republican-dominated Legislature-the voters had unknowingly installed yet another type of divided government: a House divided against itself. Washington's House is the only legislative chamber in the country with a current tie. Virginia has a de facto tie because an independent votes with the 49 Republicans to force power-sharing with the 50 Democrats. The Virginia Senate also has a power-sharing arrangement until 2000 that stems from a tie in the 1995 election. Although a tie mightily challenges legislators and intrigues analysts and reporters, it isn't unique in American history. Every election cycle since 1984 has brought a tie to at least one legislative body. The potential is even more staggering: More than 60 percent of the nation's legislative chambers, 28 Senates and 33 Houses, have an equal number of seats, meaning a tie is an ever-present possibility, particularly in political swing states. In the '70s, 12 chambers had ties. The '80s had three ties, and this dwindling decade has been ties in Alaska, Idaho, Michigan, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia and Washington state, although all of them didn't result in power-sharing agreements. Washington's tie is expected to last two years. Both parties already are gearing up for the 2000 elections. Will It Work? That was the big question mark as Washington legislators launched into their millennium-straddling session in Olympia. The easy and obvious answer, said Governor Gary Locke and the co-majorities, was that it MUST work. Gridlock is not an option if the two parties are to succeed in achieving the key tasks of the session, rebuild public confidence in the institution and build new bridges toward bipartisanship, they said with all the golly-gee-whiz optimism of an old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland movie. But the real answer is much more complicated, of course. Despite all the pledges of bipartisan cooperation, both sides privately conceded that it could be a bumpy ride as they feel their way along. "I expect we'll have a big blowup, a real meltdown every now and then, and we'll have to work our way out of it," said Representative Hans Dunshee, co-chair of the Finance Committee. He likens the tie to having "two mongrel dogs chained up together." Representative Mark Schoesler, a farmer from the Palouse country in eastern Washington, says it's like hitching up a bunch of new horses and expecting them to pull together smoothly. The co-majority leader, Representative Lynn Kessler, uses another metaphor, comparing it to a shotgun wedding or a business relationship-you can make it work, or it can descend into bickering and long days of misery. Looking to the Past The first thing co-speakers Chopp and Ballard did was to contact those who had lived through it before, 20 years ago, in the 1979 and 1980 sessions. The old co-speakers, co-chief clearks and Representative Helen Sommers, the lone current member who served through the tie, offered advice, remembrances and copies of the House rules that they had written from scratch. The most frequently mentioned bit of advice: Keep talking when the going gets tough. "That's the bottom line. They have to keep talking to each other," said Vito Chiechi, the veteran Republican counselor who was co-chief clerk during the last tie. "They must never let even a little thing develop into a great big blowup. My advice was to stop the committee meeting or the floor session and go work things out. Shut the place down long enough to figure it out so it doesn't poison the well. Government moves slowly; it doesn't have to move fast." Sommers, co-chair of the Appropriations Committee, said, "It requires people to negotiate and come to some sort of middle ground, or not much moves, or nothing moves." She said the tie is a bigger adjustment of the party that lost a clear majority-the Democrats the last time and the Republicans this time. A tie is inherently unnatural, she said, "We're structured for an adversarial relationship. True, we surmount that on many occasions, but cooperation is not the basic structure. It's adversarial. It requires a psychological adjustment." Chopp, with only two two-year terms under his belt, and Ballard, a savvy 16-year veteran, pledged open lines of communications and spent weeks during the holidays talking about everything from parking and office space to committee process and how to deal with points of order. They turned to Kessler and her Republican counterpart, Barb Lisk, to help with the rules and the myriad details. The women are friends across the aisle and have worked closely on rural economic development, so the talks were cordial from the beginning. The co-majorities largely agreed not to reinvent the wheel, but to use the procedures from the last tie as their template. The Noah Approach It's been dubbed the Noah's Ark approach: Two of everything. Shared power, rather than dividing up the spoils. In practical terms, this meant electing two speakers, speakers pro-tem, chief clerks, committee co-chairs and so on, with decisions made jointly. Chopp and Ballard alternate taking a day at the rostrum. The other speaker sits at his desk on the floor, ready to join an instant huddle with attorneys should a point of order require a ruling. The floor leaders alternate in handling the day's calendar. Although the chief clerk position as the top administrator has developed into a largely nonpartisan job, it also is the top patronage position used by the majority party to reward staff loyalty and service. Although newspapers editorialized that only one clerk was needed, the two parties agree to spend the extra $100,000 and have one appointed by each side of the aisle, as they did 20 years ago. The Republican-appointed incumbent, Tim Martin, was joined by Democrat Dean Foster, who served in the role during the last tie. Since many Democrats were new to the majority role-Republicans took over in the landslide year of 1994-Foster also has the informal role of counselor to the caucus. Committee chairs alternate days with the gavel, using an agenda that both have agreed to. The rules give the chairs a little leeway in deciding how to schedule hearings, mark up bills and report them out. The Finance Committee co-chairs, Dunshee and Republican Brian Thomas, for instance, have decided they'll report out only bills that have majority support in both parties. Comportment is important, too. Thomas and Dunshee have a deal that they won't pull any surprises or engage in potshots or efforts to embarrass the other. In the early weeks, the politeness has been exaggerated. "If you guys hug, I'm leaving," quipped state Representative Richard DeBolt, after one particularly effusive exchange between chairmen. The equally divided Rules Committee then puts together agreed-to calendars for the floor. Chopp and Ballard have pledged not to use illnesses or absences as an opening to grab control. Rules require a constitutional majority to pass legislation-49 plus one from the other side of the aisle, at the very least-but more importantly, playing games won't work in the long run, Ballard said. In the early going, there have been no major dustups, although the startup was considered slower than usual as the House felt its way along. Lobbyists say it's odd having to pitch ideas to both parties and look for agreement. "But it's more bipartisan, and that's a wonderful thing," says Michael Temple, who lobbies for trial lawyers and other clients. The House starts the budget this year, and that's expected to be the acid test of whether the bipartisanship will work. "Both parties have the right of veto is what it amounts to," says House Democratic Caucus Chair Bill Grant. "The winners are the people in the middle. The far right and the far left will not get a lot of attention." Dunshee said the session probably will produce only "Cheez Whiz, with only really homogenized stuff getting passed," and the controversial or the partisan doomed to failure. Less Is More? Life under the tie situation could be a lesser-government advocate's dream, with only the absolutely essential pieces of legislation passing, some lawmakers said. "I don't think much of anything will happen," says Senator Darlene Fairley, echoing the predictions of rank-and-file members who don't share the blue-sky public optimism of the leaders. "Usually the House is considered the six-inch pipe, really shoveling out the stuff, and we in the Senate are considered the one-inch pipe, but I think that will be reversed this session," she said. "I think we will put out more bills this time" and the House will be the final arbiter. "The agenda will be driven by the Senate and the governor," said Republican Secretary of State Ralph Munro. "Either side can stop things in the House, but they can't really start anything. I don't think the Republicans have figured out yet they're not in control." "I don't see any major activist agenda happening," said Senator Lisa Brown, pointing out the many choke points that can so easily derail legislation. That's not all bad, she said, since it fits the public mood for small-bore changes-and for politicians who don't bicker all the time. "They want us to work together on solutions, and they don't want grandstanding." After the House tie was declared, legislators quickly set about trying to lower expectations. In particular, Locke and the Democrats were feeling the pressure from their traditional interest groups-labor unions and other interests who want a bigger share of the budget pie-after the big election victories they helped to forge. Good Time for a Tie Still, if the House had to have a tie, this was a good time. The top-drawer agenda items can be counted on one hand this session, a blessing if time-consuming meltdowns occur. Social issues, including abortion, aren't expected even to get a hearing. The only absolute must-do items are the biennial operating and transportation budgets and work on saving the state's trademark salmon runs. As fortune would have it, the Legislature has at least three things going for it:
Leaders say they're reasonably optimistic about finishing on time in late April. "There is no question we will have our differences," says Co-speaker Ballard. "But is there any excuse for having a train wreck and not getting this session concluded on time? No, I don't think so. "It is a tall order, but we will do what we can to make it work." Can Niceness Work? Lawmakers say they'll make a special effort to be on their best behavior. Says Lisk, "We have to keep everyone on track. You're going to see a lot of people being nice to each other." Leaders are focusing on forging strong personal relationships, nonconfrontational debate styles are good lines of communication. Old hands say the last tie ultimately worked because of flexible leaders who were good friends across the aisle and were willing to keep talking into the night, if necessary, to iron out the kinks. "I am going to do my utmost to restore more civility to the process and I want more cooperation between the parties and the houses-and a little more moderation in the way we handle things," says Senate Leader Snyder. The Senate brought in a consultant to give what one senator called "niceness training," and House leaders say the forced joint decision making and shared power could help change the political climate. During opening speeches, several House members said Olympia should provide a counterpoint to the partisanship of the "other Washington." Speaker Chopp touted what he called "the 3Cs"-cooperation, civility and creativity-and in a symbolic gesture he called "hands across the aisle," had members cross the six-foot patch of carpet that separates the Democrats from the Republicans on the House floor. They shook hands, hugged and mugged for the cameras. "I think it will force closer cooperation between the Democrats and Republicans and force the Legislature to finally get down to the issues that have nothing to do with politics," says the governor, himself an 11-year veteran of the House. Says Locke, "We're not ordering as many red (veto) pens."
State Legislatures, March 1999. Copyright 1999 by State Legislatures. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Slicing the Turf By Dick Kirschten After more than a decade, there's still no thaw in the frozen pizza war. Eleven years ago, the General Accounting Office ridiculed the interagency food fight that lets the Agriculture Department inspect sausage pizzas but gives the Food and Drug Administration authority over cheese pizzas. It "makes no sense," growled an outraged Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., who commissioned the 1988 GAO study. This year, the government auditors are back with the same complaint: The USDA still polices plants that produce pizzas with meat toppings and the FDA still inspects plants that turn out non-meat pizzas. "One hand doesn't know what the other is doing," groused an outraged House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. The GAO's broader message is that when there are too many cooks, the broth-or in this case the pizza inspection program-gets spoiled. In a January 1999 report on management challenges and program risks, auditors point out that up to 12 different agencies administer more than 35 different laws overseeing food safety. The schizophrenic approach to pizza inspection and labeling results from the disparate regulatory approaches contained in the basic laws under which the USDA and the FDA operate. The USDA gets its marching orders from the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, while the FDA is guided by mandates authored by the House Commerce Committee and the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. This division of authority, in the GAO's opinion, "hinders the government's efforts to efficiently and effectively protect consumers from unsafe food." The situation is by no means unique to food inspection. Fragmented approaches to regulation abound throughout government and there's plenty of blame to spread around. Sometimes "it's just that agencies with broad enabling legislation have gone off on their own and created programs that are overlapping and duplicative," says GAO Associate Director J. Christopher Mihm. Other times, however, agencies are simply carrying out the contradictory directions that are handed down from competing congressional overlords. David C. King, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, notes that federal managers frequently are run ragged trying to "keep multiple committee apprised of what [their] agency is doing." Worse yet for agency heads, King writes in his 1997 book, Turf Wars: How Congressional Committees Claim Jurisdiction, "their multiple masters occasionally give conflicting demands." But pizza lovers-and devotees of saner and more easily digested government policies-should not despair. Despite the cautious pace of legislators who jealously covet turf and the prestige of having their own committee or subcommittee to chair, considerable progress is being made to reduce jurisdictional fragmentation on Capitol Hill. In the 94th Congress (1975-1976), dominated by Democrats who believed in governmental activism, the number of committees in the House and the Senate reached a bloated total of 385. Today, that number has been reduced by nearly half to 200. The biggest reduction-a 25 percent drop-came in Republican-led 104th Congress (1995-1996). For efficiency-minded GOP leaders, paring down the committee system was an appetizing prospect. As King's book notes, "In 1994, there were 266 committees and subcommittees between the House and Senate combined. There were 107 of those panels which claimed jurisdiction over the Pentagon; 90 claimed jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency, and 52 claimed some authority over programs dealing with families and children. Such examples of alleged Democratic mismanagement hit a responsive chord among Republican voters." The reforms enacted by the 104th Congress-including the elimination of a research support agency, the Office of Technology Assessment-produced a reduction of more than 1,000 staff positions. Nonetheless, more than 24,000 congressional employees remain on the books, "making Congress by far the most heavily staffed legislative branch in the world," noted American Enterprise Institute scholars Norman J. Ornstein, Thomas E. Mann and Michael J. Malbin, in their report, "Vital Statistics on Congress: 1997-1998." While one can argue-as King does-that the GOP committee reductions of 1995 did not go nearly as far as they might have, the reformers nonetheless struck a significant blow against fragmentation and jurisdictional sprawl. Perhaps even more importantly, House Republicans, at Armey's insistence, established bipartisan teams of staff members from committees with shared jurisdictional interests. As the GAO approvingly commented in a 1997 report, the purpose of the teams is "to coordinate and facilitate committee consultations with executive branch agencies." Those are all steps in the right direction, but is still may be a while before the GAO's dream of a single food-safety agency that carries out a cohesive set of laws comes to fruition. Plenty of time to send out for pizza, no matter who inspected it. Government Executive, April 1999. Copyright 1999 by National Journal Group, Inc., publisher of Government Executive. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Women in the Legislature: Numbers Inch Up Nationwide It was that old good news, bad news scenario for women in the '98 election. On the bonus side, Washington state has set a record for all legislatures in the United States. When lawmakers there are sworn in this month, almost half-41 percent-will be women, a first for women in the states. In Arizona-another first. And it truly was the "year of the woman." Women virtually took over the state, winning the top five offices-governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer and superintendent of public instruction. The sweep is the first in U.S. history. Thirty-two women will be serving in the legislature, down by one from the 1996 elections. There also are a record number of women in the Nevada Legislature-23, five in the Senate and 18 in the Assembly. That surpasses the old record of 22 in 1995. On the down side, women are nowhere near parity with their male counterparts, except in Washington. In Michigan, women were unable to increase their numbers from 31 in the House. Former Representative Maxine Berman blames term limits. "This was the first time since at least 1982, when I was elected, that we didn't add to the number of women. "That's directly because of term limits," she said. Although 16 women were elected, she added that it was "on the backs of 16 other (incumbent) women whose opportunity was taken away. It means we're going to have to struggle to hold our own." In Kentucky, the number of women in the Senate doubled-but you can still count them on one hand. Two more female senators were elected, bringing the total to four. Women represent 11.6 percent of the 138 members of the state General Assembly with 16 in the house (up three from last year). Kentucky still ranks 49th in the nation for elected female representatives where most states average 21.8 percent female members in their legislatures. In Montana, a record number of women will serve, but men still outnumber them three to one. The 1999 session will involve 38 women out of 150 members, which beats the previous 1995 record of 36. There are eight women in the Senate. Top and Bottom 10 For Women The list of states with the highest percentage of women legislators in 1999 remains the same as it was in 1998, only the order has shifted: Washington, 40.8 percent; Nevada, 36.5 percent; Arizona, 35.6 percent; Colorado, 33 percent; and Kansas, 32.7 percent. The remaining states, in order, are Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, and Minnesota. At the bottom in female representation are: Alabama, 7.9 percent; Oklahoma, 10.1 percent; Kentucky, 11.6 percent; and South Carolina and Louisiana, 11.8 percent. Rounding out the remainder are Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Arkansas, and Virginia. State Legislatures, January 1999. Copyright 1999 by State Legislatures. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. |