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In the fifties and forties the budget process there was no Congressional budget it was basically
handled I don't remember the number by thirteen fourteen fifteen different committees each
had a piece of the budget the President would send over a proposal and they would all kind
of work on their individual issues and come back with what some thought was a mess it
was completely decentralized uh seventy four nineteen seventy four there's a reform that
tries to centralize the process so there's now a Congressional proposal for the budget
just as the President proposes a budget Congress will propose it's own budget and there are
budget committees in the house and senate which theoretically have influence over all
of the smaller committees so it basically centralized the process uh the other thing
it did is the budget can't be filibustered in the Senate that was incredibly important
uh that was one of the rules the idea was let's centralize this budget we'll propose
our own budget we'll have budget committees and when it hits the Senate it can't be filibustered
that kind of budget so what's happened is Congress has been more forceful in budget
debates and you saw that with the shut down of the government in the mid nineties when
Clinton and Gingrich went into loggerheads but also more things are handled through the
budget process because it's a way around the filibuster but the budget uh limits people
in the following way doesn't it I forget the figure you tell us something like sixty or
seventy or eighty percent of the budget is spoken for yes it must be used in certain
ways under preexisting programs which means you don't really have a lot of money to play
around with why don't you explain that that's a very big phenomenon in American politics
uh that we've had now we have almost half of the budget is spoken for so between social
security uh between medicare between other kinds of those are the two big ones fixed
expenses fixed expenses Congressmen and women don't have a lot of room to do things anymore
and it keeps getting smaller and smaller so one of the things that's happened is in some
ways it's weakened Congress as an institution because with all the fighting with all the
rancor most of the thing is already set where spending is going to go uh another affect
some say is it's made everything that much you know more bitter that because you have
less to fight over because you have two dollars instead of a hundred dollars every year those
two dollars become that much more valuable and so part of the acrimony that you see is
a sense of frustration you know there's an old saying in the academic world that the
reason academic fights are so bitter is that so little is at stake and I think you're saying
the same thing here This excerpt is brought to you by the Massachusetts School of Law