When gridlock can be a friend

Don't fall off your chair when you read this ... but the United States Congress is heading toward greater fiscal responsibility. As things look now, it will have to operate with $7 billion less than anticipated in recent budget resolution talks for fiscal 2005.

And to what do we owe such restraint: Bipartisan agreement? Statesmanship?

No. Stalemate.

The political impasse is keeping legislators from aiming to spend even more money and draws new attention to an idea that used to work relatively well in the nation's capital: pay-as-you-go rules. The outcome of the situation may determine whether that budget tool gets revived intact or dulled.

The current stalemate involves the Senate. The conservative Republican leadership has not been able to reach a deal with four moderate GOP senators on a resolution that would set spending levels and "pay-as-you-go" rules for fiscal 2005. The leadership wants to make President Bush's tax cuts permanent and enact more tax cuts. The four moderates want to avoid deepening the already huge deficit.

Their votes, combined with that of Democratic senators, can block any budget resolution they consider damaging.

"There is gridlock," says Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group. "I'm not sure it will prevent deficits from going up. But it's important that Congress is aware that it has to take steps. The deficit is not going away by itself."

Without a Senate budget resolution deal, a House-Senate conference committee cannot come up with a budget reconciliation bill that, under Senate procedures, would need only 50 votes (plus Vice President Cheney) to pass. Instead, any new tax cuts or moves to make provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent will need, under Senate rules, at least 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.

All this means that the Senate will operate on the basis of last year's budget resolution. It has a cap on spending of $814 billion, a bit lower than the $821.2 billion under the budget resolution that the House-Senate conferees were discussing.

Now, when considering the 13 appropriation bills Congress passes each year, any increase in costs in one area covered by each bill will need to be offset within the 13 appropriations subcommittees by a cut in another area covered by that bill, says Richard Kogan, an expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

The Senate, in effect, would go back to using budget rules that governed it for 185 years prior to passage of the Congressional Budget Act in 1975.

That bit of fiscal discipline could last awhile. Probably no budget agreement for 2005 will get passed until after the November election, if then. In general, politicians hate making tough decisions about cutting programs or raising taxes just before voters go to the polls.

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