The Laudable Pursuit: How to Prevent Another Spending Disaster

From Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah:

April 27, 2018

"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln

Chairman's Note: How to Prevent Another Spending Disaster

"I will never sign another bill like this again," President Trump said after signing last month's 2,232 page, $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill.

President Trump is right. The omnibus bill passed by Congress this March betrayed everything for which conservatives stand.

Not only did it bust the spending caps conservatives worked so hard to secure in 2011 by more than $250 billion but it also failed to build the border wall President Trump promised during his campaign. The bill also included language limiting the ability of federal law enforcement officers to enforce our nation's immigration laws. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi identified this limit as a huge win for California Democrats.

I fully agree with President Trump: a spending bill like the one passed this March must never happen again.

Unfortunately, Congress currently is on a path to repeat this disbursement debacle.

While the House and Senate appropriations committees have both admirably begun the process of passing next year's spending bills, congressional leaders have not yet indicated when they plan to give these bills the floor time they need to become law.

This virtually ensures that the next spending bill will again be written behind closed doors and will not be made public until just days before it needs to be passed. Even then, we should not expect to see the bill until after the September 30 deadline. Instead, if the past decade of swamp-life is any indication, Congress will pass a continuing resolution that will extend funding for the federal government past the November election and into a December lame-duck Congress.

At that point, unless Republicans defy history by actually gaining seats, Democrats will have all the leverage in spending negotiations since they can promise Republicans will only get a worse deal when a far more progressive Congress is sworn in in 2019. That would be a recipe for a debacle even worse than the one Congress forced President Trump to sign in March.

It doesn't have to be this way. There is another path.

Republicans still control both chambers of Congress and the White House. The House could begin passing the 12 appropriations bills necessary to fund the government under the ordinary budget process. The Senate could then move to debate. And yes, at that point Democrats may try to block debate on appropriations bills.

But let's make them actually block debate!

Consider how this would work in practice. We could call up the Department of Defense appropriations bill and show the American public whether Democrats support, or don't, paying the troops. If Democrats refused to begin debate on the appropriations bill, they then would have to explain why they are obstructing funding for our nation's men and women in uniform.

We never even tried that last year. Instead we waited until we were already over four months into the fiscal year before we held one vote to begin debate on the Defense appropriations bill in February 2018. But as soon as that vote was held, we immediately tucked tail and moved on to other things. We didn't fight, and the American people lost as a result.

Even if we don't get all 12 appropriations bills passed in the Senate, at a bare minimum Congress should pledge to continually try to debate them and to cancel weekends and recesses to force more work. If an omnibus is still necessary after Democrat obstruction over the next four months, Congress should then release its omnibus spending bill a month before the September 30th deadline.

That way the American people will have time to read it and lawmakers will have time to debate, write amendments, and vote on changes to the bill.

President Trump could even get the whole process jumpstarted this month by submitting a rescission package to Congress identifying the spending he wants to cut from the last spending bill.

None of this is going to be easy, because governing is hard. There is no magic wand that President Trump can wave to produce a spending bill he would be proud to sign.

But with some hard work and lots of tough votes, Congress can make sure that what happened last month never happens again.

Originally published by the Federalist http://newsletter.senate.gov/ct/47440754:WHfNYZVON:m:1:1093010235:83DB0825B48469ECC4D7CB6FBADDB912:r

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Issue in Focus: Mueller legislation is unconstitutional

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee considered legislation providing that any special counsel appointed by the Justice Department may be fired only for good cause and allowing a special counsel who has been fired to challenge the decision in court.

The proposal is politically salient because many fear the president will fire Robert Mueller. To be clear, the president should allow Mueller to finish his investigation into Russia's election interference in a timely fashion.

But this legislation is unconstitutional, and political expedience can never trump the Constitution.

Supporters of the legislation argue it is necessary to ensure no one is above the law, but the Constitution is the highest law of the land, and the Constitution provides that only the president can exercise executive power.

Because the power to prosecute is the quintessential executive authority, any congressional attempt to direct prosecutions -- including by limiting the president's power to fire a prosecutor -- is an unconstitutional breach in the separation of powers. All senators swear to uphold the Constitution, and I hope that the full Senate will not pass this legislation if it is brought to the floor.

Moreover, the Constitution itself provides several ways to hold executive branch officials accountable, most notably through elections. We should stick with those remedies, because undermining the separation of powers is a grave threat to liberty.

Some may question how legislation meant to hold the president accountable is a danger to liberty. It's because it would empower the creation of unaccountable federal prosecutors who could not be fired for acting unjustly or unwisely. In 1940, then-Attorney General Robert Jackson said "the prosecutor has more control over life, liberty and reputation than any other person in America."

That's even more true if the prosecutor has been made unaccountable to the public, yet that's exactly what this legislation aims to do.

Originally published by USATODAY (http://newsletter.senate.gov/ct/47440756:WHfNYZVON:m:1:1093010235:83DB0825B48469ECC4D7CB6FBADDB912:r)