October 4, 1979
Page 27336
SENATOR ED MUSKIE — MAKING THE BUDGET PROCESS WORK
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, it is fair to say that the loneliest and most thankless job in the U.S. Senate is the job of trying to make the budget process work.
At the same time, it is also fair to say that the best thing that has happened to the Senate in recent years has been the enactment of the Budget Reform Act of 1974. And the best thing that has happened to the Senate under the Budget Reform Act has been the installation of Senator ED MUSKIE of Maine as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Other members of the Budget Committee also deserve credit for their influential role in making the process work, primarily Senator HENRY BELLMON Of Oklahoma, who has been so effective in insuring that the process avoids the pitfalls of partisanship.
But, Mr. President, I wanted to take the floor today to add my own commendation to the acclaim that Senator MUSKIE deserves for his brilliant work in shepherding the second concurrent resolution on the fiscal year 1980 budget through the Senate in recent weeks.
All of us who participated in the debate were well aware of the issues facing the Senate in our attempt to reconcile the demands of fiscal responsibility with the preservation of vital domestic programs. The lengthy debate on the floor and in our caucuses testified clearly to the potential divisiveness of the major issues in the resolution.
In the course of the debate over many days, however, Senator MUSKIE was able to persuade a reluctant Senate to accept the discipline required over Federal spending if we are to reach the goal of bringing our sick economy back to health.
When they called the roll at the end of the debate, the vote was 90 to 6 in favor of Senator MUSKIE's substitute amendment — perhaps the most important victory the budget process has won so far in the Senate, and a tribute to the eloquence, perseverance, and extraordinary legislative skill of our distinguished colleague from the State of Maine.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article from the Washington Post of September 20, reflecting Senator MUSKIE's achievement, be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 20, 1979]
A LONELY FIGURE: MUSKIE TRIES TO HOLD OFF FISCAL WOLVES
(By Ward Sinclair)
The travail of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) will be understood by anyone who has tried to ward off creditors demanding payment and children wanting toys — with nothing but an astronomically unbalanced checkbook at hand.
Muskie has been a lonely sort of figure this week on the Senate floor, playing the role of an adamant patriarch trying to bring restraint and horse-sense to a squabbling, grasping family.
The fight this week is over federal spending — who gets the money, who gets cut and who gets boosted, where the priorities will rest in divvying up the tax dollars.
As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, which sets the guidelines and rides legislative shotgun on these matters, Muskie is the man with the unhappy task of holding off the fiscal wolves.
Muskie lost his effort to thwart the hawkishness that led to Senate approval Tuesday of a big increase in defense spending. But efforts to hold down domestic spending were successful.
On paper, nothing could be quite as sleep inducing as the prospect of a Senate debate over what is aridly described as the second concurrent resolution on the budget, fiscal 1980.
But the reality on the floor has been something far different. Contrary to the Senate's often illusory clashes, this has been a genuine collision between philosophy, politics, personality and senatorial turf.
The central player is Muskie and, in many ways, it has been vintage stuff — voices lifted to a shout, fingers being pointed, emotion thick enough to slice and no little amount of overstatement.
Muskie's message this week has been simple: the United States faces no greater threat to its security than rampant inflation and that spending restraint — not increases for defense or anything else — is the only way to deal with it.
Everyone in the Senate favors restraint, of course, unless it hurts a pet program.
"You cannot have it two ways," Muskie said at one point. "All aspects of the budget, defense and nondefense, have to be controlled by this body if we are to control inflation."
The Maine senator's emergence as an evangel of restrained spending (he always has been viewed as one of the Senate's premier liberals) is due in part to the way congressional process has changed dramatically in a few years.
For a century or more until the mid-1970s, the process called for each committee to pass its programs, each chamber to pass out appropriations and then, if spending happened to coincide with the reality of federal income, it was a nice bonus.
Then, after former President Nixon began impounding funds already appropriated by Congress, the genie of reform was loosed on Capitol Hill. Muskie, the late Sen. Lee Metcalf (D.-Mont.) and former Sen. Sam I. Ervin (D.-N.C.) in 1973 proposed creation of congressional budget committees.
Those committees' task would involve more'than just reconciling federal income with federal spending. For the first time, Congress would have a counterbalance to the budget proposals of the executive branch.
The budget act was passed, the committees set up and Muskie was chosen as chairman of the Senate panel. That was 1974 and every year since, Muskie has been insinuating the committee deeper and deeper into the process.
That has meant stepping on the toes of the more influential committee chairmen, sometimes telling them no — a thousand times no — they cannot exceed the spending limits put on their committees each spring.
A watershed, as Muskie staffers remember, occurred on the fiscal 1976 budget. In one week, defense and food stamp spending bills were rejected because they came in over limits.
And during that year, with each appropriation and authorization bill that came to the floor,
Muskie would stand up and remind theSenate how each of those measures would have an impact on overall spending.
That underscored the seriousness of the senator and his message was understood.
The process has worked to a reasonable degree in large part, most Senate observers agree, because Muskie and Sen. Henry Bell; mon (R.-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the committee, have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in chasing away budget predators.
Generally, Muskie, now 65 and in his fifth term, is better, known nationally for his work as an architect of the landmark environmental protection laws of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Muskie continues as chairman of an environment subcommittee, but the emphasis of his work these days is on the budget process — watching it, advancing it, pushing away the empire builders.
"He has said he would rather be budget chairman than majority leader,"said one of his assistants. "He takes the budget thing very seriously and he sees it as his lasting legacy here, to solidify the process and make it permanent.'"
Which means, of course, stepping on toes and saying no — even to Maine. He caught some hell this week from constituents when he objected to increases in veterans benefits and school lunch spending.