Congress vs. the President: Power of the Purse

The Constitution only grants Congress control over funds; it doesn’t allow them to violate the recipients' constitutional rights. An unethical example of this is that in 1976 the Supreme Court was forced to uphold the Hyde amendment; disallowing taxpayers money to be used for abortions (216). 
Congress and Presidential budget priorities:
Prompted by WW1, the Budget and Accounting Act 1921 dictates that the president create a budget request for the Congress. The responsibility placed on the president, it is simply a recommendation and congress holds the prerogative to increase or decrease it. Some Presidents chose not to use the impoundment funds: Johnson chose not to use the $312.5M added to the agriculture appropriation bill and save it for the coming years (223). Because Nixon canceled several programs for refusing to accept Congressional add ons, the Impoundment Control Act 1974 now requires permission from both houses to terminate impoundment funds. It is difficult to contest both presidential and congressional budgets because they have different hierarchical structures. In 1981, Reagan gained control over the budget resolutions-pushing his priorities of tax cuts and defense build-up, the national deficit tripled from $1trillion to $3trillion (229). Congress delegated the enactment of the GRH Act 1985 (both branches meet specific targets to bring the deficit down) to the Comptroller general. The government is still attempting to balance the fiscal defect.

Secret Spending:

The Statements and Accounts Clause states that accounting for spending must be public but the ambiguous nature of the language results in billions of dollars of covert spending. Before WW1, secret spending was minimal compared to the $1B confidential funding spent on the nuclear bomb alone. The CIA violates the clause and most confidential spending is directed to the CIA. Congress faced pressure to publish CIA accounts; CIA directors including William Colby held that the aggregate figure wouldn’t do much harm, only the pressure to release further details would compromise on national security (237). As of 2012, the figure for CIA spending stands at $75.4B.

Purse+Sword:

Congress tries to reduce the amount of spending on foreign affairs, especially after the Iran-Contra Affair but the President's power over foreign affairs makes it difficult. So much so that the Congress held that between 1984-86, no CIA spending could be reallocated to the Nicaraguan Contra (241). The President ended obtaining funds from private individuals and foreign governments. Fisher claims that the constitution is designed to separate the power over war and money to avoid bloodshed. After 1994, all gift funds from private individuals get put in the Treasury Department and can only be spent with Congress’ permission (243). Bush signed the legislation disallowing foreign aid to avoid quid pro quos (245). The president can only carry out foreign affairs using funds appropriated from Congress.




Sources: Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President - Louis Fisher

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Analysis of poems in the Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Tretheway's collection of poems titled ‘Native Guard’ is a deeply emphatic account of instances in her life and her past that revolve around themes of death, family, prejudice, and freedom. These themes are hinted at throughout the poem weaved in with the distinct unique idea present in each section. After the first read, the difference of each section is very visible-the first chapter of the book is about her mother, second about the Civil War and the history of her town, and the final deals with her personal identity as a mixed-race woman. The famous phrase ‘life is a journey’ is brought put in her first poem in section I, titled Southern Crescent. The poem is able to effectively bring out how close Trethewey and her mother are; describing two instances of disappointment at the hands of two men (her mother’s father and husband) shows that the lives of Tretheway and her mom seem complete without male presence and they seem optimistic about the final train ride. Although ...
Read more

Environmental Ethics: Assessing Scale- Analysis of Morgan-Knapp and Goodman

‘There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem.’- Eldridge Cleaver In ‘Consequentialism, Climate Harm and Individual Obligations’, Christopher Morgan-Knapp and Charles Goodman critique the argument that abiding by act-consequentialism assumes that individual emissions don’t matter because they are too minuscule. Building off their arguments, I am going to analyze the relevance of their theories and examples with the lens that climate changes disproportionally affects poorer, indigenous, and marginalized communities and conclude with a test that suggests the optimum size of an industry is based on the relationship between its emissions and the number of people dependent on it and what an environmentally oriented government should do. Morgan-Knapp and Goodman start by stating the commonly held view that act-consequentialism cannot provide any moral reason for individuals to voluntarily reduce the...
Read more