It’s not unusual for administrative agencies to squabble with Congress over appropriations, but the recent fights between Republican lawmakers and Bush’s Department of Homeland Security might speak to a bigger issue.
Two recent appropriations bills passed by the Republican-controlled House include language scolding the Bush administration for its lack of responsiveness to repeated Congressional requests for information — an unusual sign of tension within the typically united Republican ranks.
In both the Homeland Security and energy and water appropriations measures, Members sought to send a message that willful avoidance of Congress’ oversight function carries penalties for the administration, no matter who holds the White House.
“It hurts me to cut or withhold funds for an agency that desperately needs the money, but I don’t know what else we can do,” said Kentucky Rep. Hal Rogers (R), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on Homeland Security. “This is tough love.”
In one instance, the House appropriations bill on energy and water took the Army Corps of Engineers to task for moving money between projects without informing Congress. In another instance, Bush’s DHS refused to respond to lawmakers’ request for budgetary information — little things like where the money will be spent — so, left with little choice, the House cut more than $485 million in funding.
This touches on two things that didn’t seem to come up very often in Bush’s first term: Republican lawmakers’ tension with the White House and Congress’ interest in administrative oversight.
Yes, these were just a couple of appropriations bills, so it’s far too soon to start claiming some seismic shift. But consider the context of just this week. Bush tried to force the nuclear option through the Senate, but some Republican lawmakers refused to cooperate. Bush promised to veto a bill expanding federally funded stem-cell research, but 50 House Republicans voted for it anyway. Bush asked Congress to fully fund his Department of Homeland Security and the Army Corps of Engineers, but conservative Republican House members said they couldn’t, in good conscience, allocate the funds in light of the administration’s needless secrecy.
It’s only a week, and it may not last, but Congress simply didn’t have, or wasn’t willing to show, this kind of independence before. Up until extremely recently, what Bush wanted, Bush received. The White House would show disdain and contempt for Congress, and lawmakers essentially said, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” As Mary Lynn F. Jones explained last year:
…Bush misled Congress in July 2002 by spending $700 million lawmakers thought they had assigned to fight the war in Afghanistan, using it instead to plan the war against Iraq. As Bob Woodward told Mike Wallace, “Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution, which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this.â€?
It’s not the first time and you can bet it won’t be the last. In 2003, the administration hid the estimate of the Medicare prescription-drug plan to ensure that conservative lawmakers didn’t balk over the bill’s cost and vote the plan down. On numerous other measures, such as the No Child Left Behind bill, the administration put its mouth one place and its spending priorities somewhere else. And twice this year Bush has installed judges who could not win Senate confirmation, thwarting the Senate’s “advise and consent” role.
Of course, Bush has never prized Congress as a co-equal branch of government. Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly ignored questions from the General Accounting Office about his energy panel. Some lawmakers complained after 9-11 that they got more information from news reports than from intelligence briefings.
That was then. Bush now has an approval rating in the low-40s, he’s a lame duck, and Republican lawmakers are starting to get worried about the 2006 midterms. To their credit, some of them are looking across Pennsylvania Avenue and wondering, “Why should we keep carrying water for this guy?”
On a related note, it’s also encouraging to see lawmakers begin to appreciate their oversight responsibilities again. Last year, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Senate Finance Committee chairman, admitted, “We Republicans have never quite reached the level of competent oversight that the Democrats developed over their 40 years that they controlled Congress. We tried to emphasize legislating, and we’ve delegated so much authority to the executive branch of government, and we ought to devote more time to oversight than we do.”
In 2001, Congress just gave up on oversight and effectively embraced a parliamentary system. It’s not that Republicans used their oversight authority poorly; they acted as though they didn’t believe in oversight at all. Scandals — the Plame Game, Abu Ghraib, WMD in Iraq, lies to Congress about the costs of Bush’s Medicare scheme — went completely overlooked. Questions surrounding Bush’s education policy, funding for the war(s), and administration energy policy were all are summarily dismissed, as if lawmakers didn’t even want to know what the White House is up to.
Maybe, just maybe, Congress is beginning to reassert itself as a co-equal branch of government.