Senate GOP Considers Granting Unilateral Budgetary Powers to President
Not clear on where that lies in the Constitution ...
Days before the March 1 deadline, Senate Republicans are circulating a draft bill that would cancel $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts and instead turn over authority to President Barack Obama to achieve the same level of savings under a plan to be filed by March 8.
The five- page document, which has the tacit support of Senate GOP leaders, represents a remarkable shift for the party. Having railed against Senate Democrats for not passing a budget, Republicans are now proposing that Congress surrender an important piece of its Constitutional "power of the purse" for the last seven months of this fiscal year.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
At this point, I think that the Legislative Branch is completely broken. Unable to complete one of their core functions for years (passing a budget)they now want to expand executive authority even more. Even if the expansion is just until the end of the fiscal year, it’s still a crazy idea.
Isn’t this how Hitler came to power when the German form of a senate gave him that power.
To me this is scary if the Senate and the House are not willing to do their job then what are we paying them for, maybe we should just close shop and let Obama do whatever he wants.
This I believe is a theater put on by both parties where the democrats play good cop to the republicans who are playing the bad cop to us the audience of this show. They play their parts to get to a common goal and I don’t like where that obvious goal will end up 100% state control.