The Pelosi Rules The Speaker changes House procedures to increase spending and stifle dissent. By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pelosi-rules-11609792916?mod=opinion_lead_pos10
Georgia voters, you can’t say Nancy Pelosi hasn’t warned you. The Speaker of the House is clarifying today that without a Republican Senate to serve as a check on her chamber, the 117th Congress is prepared to follow the fiscal blowout of 2020 with another historic surge in federal spending and debt. New House rules will eliminate one of the few modest institutional restraints on government budgets and further reduce the power of minority Republicans to impede the Pelosi agenda.
For anyone who’s been wondering whether the loss of Democratic House seats in November’s elections might encourage the Speaker to run a less partisan and less ideological House, you have your answer. Mrs. Pelosi has now endorsed a budgeting rule championed by radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). The basic idea is to make every liberal priority eligible for “emergency” spending and remove it from any debate about government priorities.
Not that the rules enacted to this point by Speaker Pelosi and her predecessors have offered much resistance to the fleecing of taxpayers. The pile of publicly held U.S. Treasury debt is now larger than our entire economy and Washington’s unfunded entitlement promises are many times larger than that.
But when Mrs. Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel in 2019, she felt the need to maintain at least the appearance of being concerned about reckless federal borrowing. Amid a flourish of pronouncements about transparency and government reform, two years ago the Speaker angered Rep. Ocasio-Cortez with the re-imposition of a House rule purporting to require that new spending be offset by budget savings elsewhere.
The Speaker seems to have concluded that transparency and reform are overrated. Roll Call reports:
The new rules package for the 117th Congress unveiled by House Democrats on Friday would grant a sweeping new exemption from deficit controls for legislation related to the coronavirus pandemic or efforts to curb climate change.
The text of the resolution, which House leaders expect to take up Monday, would provide House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., broad authority to “adjust” cost estimates for certain bills so that their budgetary impacts don’t count as increasing deficits under House rules.
In practice, the new section means legislation that fits within the two broad new categories doesn’t need to comply with appropriations limits affecting discretionary programs, or pay-as-you-go rules for measures affecting tax revenues and “direct spending,” otherwise known as mandatory programs.
Taxpayers will either laugh or cry at the notion that appropriations of their money have been limited to this point—and that now the really big spending can occur.
The text of the new rule suggests a lot of room for maneuver:
Exemptions. Subsection (v) provides that the Chair of the Committee on Budget may adjust an estimate to exempt the budgetary effects of measures to prevent, prepare for, or respond to economic or public health consequences resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic; and measures to prevent, prepare for, or respond to economic, environmental, or public health consequences resulting from climate change.
Is there any Democratic spending priority that the creative staff of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez cannot define as somehow related to Covid or climate change?
Just in case any lawmakers are inclined to stand athwart the federal fisc yelling stop, Nancy Pelosi has an answer for that, too. Starting this week, minority Republicans will have even less power to amend bills pushed by her majority. The “motion to recommit” procedure, previously used by the minority to force votes on potential improvements to a bill, will now only allow dissenters on the House floor to delay bills, not change them.
After voters gave Democrats a smaller majority in the House last fall, Speaker Pelosi could have responded by heeding the message and charting a more moderate course. Instead she’s changing congressional rules to muzzle dissent and enable another policy surge to the left. It’s up to Georgians to stop her.
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Mr. Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
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