The Honorable Jim Cooper
Co-Chair for Policy
The Blue Dog Coalition
1536 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Congressman Cooper and Members of the Democrat Blue Dog Coalition:
We write to express our views on your 12-point plan to "restore fiscal sanity" in Washington. The undersigned organizations applaud your effort and stand ready to offer you assistance in your struggle to end Congress's sorry record of profligate spending.
Lawmakers seeking common ground in the fight against out-of-control deficit spending will find many useful directions for reaching it with your budget reform package. Your plan contains several proposals that we aggressively backed at the beginning of this Congress when they were first proposed by the House Republican Study Committee, such as requiring bills calling for more than $50 million in new spending to be put to a roll call vote, ending abuses of the "emergency" spending designation, and repealing the "Gephardt Rule" that allows lawmakers to raise the federal debt limit automatically with the Budget Resolution.
But we also support other, unique elements of the Blue Dog package, which would:
- Cap discretionary spending for the next three years at 2.1 percent ? lower than the President's proposal;
- Force Members of Congress to justify earmarked pet projects (pork) in writing;
- Freeze the budget of any federal agency that fails to pass an audit; and,
- Require Members to be given at least three days to read the final text of legislation.
Likewise, we praise your proposal for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would require peacetime federal outlays to balance with revenues unless a 3/5 "supermajority" in Congress approved a specific deficit (this measure passed the House in 1995 and subsequently fell one vote short of the 2/3 margin required for Senate passage).
However, we would also favor enactment of a Constitutional Amendment establishing a 2/3 "supermajority" safeguard against higher taxes, and would oppose extension of the so-called "PAYGO" rules to taxation that often thwart long-term tax relief. Nonetheless, we believe most elements of the Blue Dog package would be significant steps toward restoring the federal budget process to a condition worthy of the word "process" instead of "debacle."
The most profligate spending spree since Lyndon Johnson has bipartisan fingerprints on it, and it will take a bipartisan grip to pull on the reins. Thus, we would encourage you to seek a working relationship ? perhaps even an alliance ? with Members of the Republican Study Committee who have been sounding an often-lonely alarm bell over the need to reverse runaway federal spending. With your coalition offering serious ideas on how to change the course of our fiscal ship, conditions are ripe to make desperately needed bipartisan repairs to the faulty rudder that has been steering the budget process into a sea of red ink.
Sincerely,
| National Taxpayers Union | American Legislative Exchange Council |
| American Conservative Union | Americans for Prosperity |