U.S. Sen Richard Shelby has been in office since 1987. Last month, the 86-year-old Republican announced he would not seek a seventh term.
Thirty-four years is a lot of time to spend in the Senate, and before he was a senator, Shelby was a member of the U.S. House for an additional eight years, meaning Shelby has been in one chamber of Congress or the other since bell bottoms were in style.
In that time, he introduced a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution 17 times. Last week, he made it 18.
Old habits are indeed hard to break. Having gone nowhere the first 17 times, the balanced budget amendment seems particularly doomed this go-round, with the Senate split 50-50.
Democrats have never shown interest in the balanced budget amendment, and Republicans showed no interest during the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, when the GOP controlled both houses of Congress.
Reining in spending and worrying about the national debt are only Republican preoccupations when out of power. When in power, they can spend as drunkenly as any Democrat.
Yet the mounting debt is a problem, and it is not helped by the recent passage of the latest $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, which did include some necessary COVID relief but also contained money for a long list of Democratic priorities having nothing to do with the pandemic. (It also doesn’t help that even some of the COVID-related spending won’t get where it’s going until after the pandemic subsides.)
“I have long believed that our Constitution lacks proper constraint on government spending,” Shelby said last week in a prepared statement. “If we continue in this unsustainable direction, the burden will land on our children and our grandchildren.”
Currently, the U.S. national debt stands at about $28 trillion. This is a long-term drag on the economy.
Aside from being dead on arrival, however, there’s no guarantee a balanced budget amendment would actually control spending. For one thing, it wouldn’t apply during wartime, and the U.S. has been continually at war somewhere for decades. For another, Congress is adept at finding ways around any spending limitations.
Ending earmarks, for example, was supposed to curtail spending by taking away the ability of congressmen to load bills with pork for their districts. Since the ban was enacted in 2011, discretionary spending has continued to rise. All banning earmarks did was move decisions about pork barrel spending higher up the food chain, from ordinary congressmen to party leaders and committee chairs — chairs like Shelby, who is the ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee.
From his perch, Shelby has been able to obtain what his office always calls “critical” or “crucial” funding for programs here in Alabama. Maybe some of it even is crucial, but probably lawmakers from other states think some of it is pork.
Now Republicans are doing away with the earmark ban. This may be for the best. There is a school of thought that believes part of the increasing partisanship in Congress is due to the increased discipline party leaders wield because of their greater control over spending during the ban.
There is simply no will in either party for fiscal discipline during good times, and bad times — like a pandemic or the Great Recession — simply provide an excuse to tack on additional spending to spending that is needed.
Shelby’s 18th attempt at getting his colleagues to pass a balanced budget amendment amounts to little more than a curtain call.
March 21, 2021
https://www.thestate.com/news/article250165575.html
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