I am not the author of this piece. Bill Foster (see the link) is however a veteran of the USN having retired after 21 (I think) years of active duty. I think the piece is important and deserves as wide of an audience as possible. I am including the full text as well as the link. Share it if you feel the urge.
In the interest of full disclosure, Bill has published several of my essays to his Substack and in theory, will do more as I write more. Enjoy. Discuss. Share.
Bill Foster's Substack - Read a lot. Don't die.
On a Friday last month, shortly after midnight, in a move that was not covered properly by the media, the House voted on a $9 billion recissions bill, clawing back money already appropriated by congress. This bill marks the end of congress as an institution. It is the straw that breaks the camel’s back in a decades-long process of congress giving up institutional power to the executive branch. Our constitution establishes three coequal branches, with checks and balances between them. However, as the executive as accrued more and more power to itself, the legislative branch has simply rolled over time and time again. There are no longer people in congress who protect the institution itself. Instead of a coequal branch of government, congress has become the prize won after elections. It is no longer a battlefield. Instead, it is the reward for the winning team.
The Founders referred to political parties as factions and thought they had designed a system of government in which the built-in separation of powers would subsume competition. Factions would not arise because the separation of powers would create factions in government. Here is the thing though: Parties are inevitable. Every single time someone says to me (and it is OFTEN), “Man, parties are destroying this country,” I ask them to name a democracy without one. Hell, even China has parties within the communist party. People get together and compromise and that makes parties. You can no more have a democracy without parties than you can have an ocean without water. You can do whatever you want to your government but as soon as you say, “I want a law that makes it illegal to lasso a fish [TN]” and someone says, “I’ll vote for that if you vote to make whale hunting illegal on Sundays [OH],” well, you have a political party. It is inevitable.
And parties are ESSENTIAL Society is made up of different people who want different things so the way you get laws is through compromise. Parties are organizations that compromise and provide information. As a voter, what do you really know about tariffs? Probably more than you did a year ago, but I doubt you can discuss the differences between the GATT and the WTO and how one led to the other, let alone what the proper tariff rate is for rivets. Can you discuss how chickens relate to light trucks via tariffs? Can you discuss how tariff engineering influenced Converse sneakers? Where is the Court of International Trade and what are its powers (as you can probably see, this is a future column)? That is the purpose of representative government. I get irritated at online arguments where someone says, “you don’t know this or that.” Of course I don’t. The modern world is complicated, and it takes years to know most things. We try to elect a representative and a party that we agree with.
Unfortunately, a multitude of trends are working against representative democracy right now, first among them gerrymandering. When a district is gerrymandered to make it safe, it becomes impossible for a centrist to become elected. Candidates in gerrymandered districts don’t have to compromise. Their fear is being primaried by a more extreme candidate. When candidates on both sides of any individual issue fear facing a primary election more than they fear not accomplishing something, compromise becomes impossible. This is a much more serious problem than is commonly acknowledged.
The more extreme candidates that gain office because of gerrymandering are also to blame for congress no longer being a coequal branch of government. Neither party works to protect the legitimacy of congress as an institution. This has been going on for decades. It has been going on since World War II, minus the brief post-Watergate respite. It is congress’s duty to resist power grabs by the executive branch. At key moments in history, bipartisan movements have arisen to maintain congress’s power. For example, after the Vietnam War, congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973. Since its passage, it has been weakened because congress has refused to assert its powers as every consecutive president has violated it. The Constitution clearly grants the power to declare war to congress. The nonsensical argument the executive tends to make is that bombing another country is not declaring war. Congress could easily clarify that if they wished by amending the War Powers Act but there is no interest in doing so because individual members of Congress prefer to take credit if it goes well and assign blame if it does not. No one is willing to stand up for the institution and the reason they are unwilling to do so is because they are mostly in safe districts and there is nothing to be gained by doing so.
The situation is that we have a Congress in which trust is difficult to attain because of partisanship. Partisanship gets increased because of gerrymandering and incumbency advantages. This is why Congress has not passed a budget since 1996. Did you know that? It has been THIRTY FUCKING YEARS since we have had a budget. Instead, Congress passes a set of continuing resolutions every year because the compromises necessary to make an actual budget are seemingly unattainable.
Now, on top of this situation, we have added recissions bills. The recissions process comes from the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. When Congress passes a bill authorizing spending, the executive must spend the funds. If they refuse to do so, that is called impoundment. Impoundment is illegal but the Trump Administration is doing it anyway, and as a result there are several lawsuits working their way through the courts. Under the ICA, the administration can impound funds legally by notifying Congress that they wish to impound the money within 45 days. This is called a recission and this is why they had to wait till midnight to pass the bill as that was the deadline.
The bill cancelled $9 billion in funding for USAID, public broadcasting, various UN health agencies, the UN human rights council and refugee assistance. Now, what I have written so far is bad enough, but it is important to look at this in context. This administration has impounded many separate sets of funds for many months. It is important to look at how illegal this is. Congress appropriates money and the executive spends it. That’s it. If the administration refuses to spend the money, they are usurping the power of congress, which is a major violation of the constitution. Congress was not notified within 45 days about the funds in the recissions bill but only after many months. All of this is part of a pattern of the administration using a variety of illegal means to not expend appropriated funds for activities it doesn’t approve of.
This recissions bill is the largest ever passed, the first since 1999 and only the second since 1974. It fundamentally rearranges Congress. This is because budget negotiations are based on compromise. Let us say that one party wants increased defense spending and the other party wants increased spending for health care. They trade so they each get what they want. But now, the party that wants to increase defense spending can agree to the health care spending and then just pass a recissions bill to impound the health care money. You can make whatever compromise you want to get 60 votes, then pass a recissions bill and take it back with only a fifty-one-vote majority. This is literally the last straw, and I imagine that this is going to break the appropriations process and that we are headed for a major fiscal process as it is impossible to come to a compromise when the other side has a tool like this and has shown the willingness to use it in an abusive manner.
The only question now is how the Democrats will respond. We are headed for a couple different debt ceiling and budget showdowns, and the Republicans are not going to give. They will threaten a US default, which could have unimaginable costs, a 2008 style crash. However, if they are willing to compromise, how can they be trusted with recissions on the table? The Republicans are going to be terrorists threatening to shoot the hostages and, unfortunately, I don’t see any way out of the situation except to let them do so and hope the public recognizes who is actually at fault, just like they recognize who is at fault in most of Trump’s …. Um …. Shit …. We’re screwed.
