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Op-Ed Contributor

The Shutdown Shows the Twisted Rules of a Broken Congress

The Capitol building in Washington, D.C.Credit...Erin Schaff for The New York Times

This week’s government shutdown is a bipartisan failure, with bad faith all around, and both parties trying to blame the other for the consequences, in hopes of winning one for the team.

But it is also a systemic failure, in which an outdated budget process — the complex set of procedures that keeps the government open — has become an empty ritual, twisted in the service of narrow partisan gain.

The source of today’s dysfunctions goes back more than 40 years, to the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. That law was passed as a result of a perception within Congress — which under the Constitution holds the power of the purse — that the White House had too much influence over the budget.

The law overhauled congressional budget development procedures in a manner intended to shift the balance of power in federal budgeting away from the executive and toward the legislature — and created the modern budget process.

That process is kick-started by the drafting of an annual budget resolution that was initially intended to serve as a check on the president’s proposal.

The budget resolution is a blueprint — a series of goals and instructions that lawmakers are supposed to follow. Think of it as a sort of congressional mission statement, meant to ensure that the process is not driven solely by executive branch priorities. The resolution is then supposed to be followed by a series of spending bills, hashed out in congressional committees, by the beginning of the government’s fiscal year, which was set in October.

But in the 1990s, after decades of Congress being mostly controlled by Democrats, Republicans took power, and in the process upended the long-held assumption that Democrats would almost always be in charge. This changed the political incentive structure for both parties. The old model assumed that the main point of conflict was between two branches of government, Congress and the White House, and thus rewarded collaboration and legislative trading between parties.

But with the possibility that Congress could change hands more often, the new incentive was to use the budget process as a tool of partisan skirmishing that would make it easier to retain or regain control of the legislature. Instead of negotiating to achieve policy goals while maintaining a unified front against the executive, Congress was at war with itself.

A result is that Congress hasn’t completed the entire budget process, with all the spending bills, on time in more than 20 years. Many years, it has not passed any budget resolution at all. This is perhaps the most basic responsibility of the legislative branch, yet for decades, Congress has repeatedly come up short.

During the Obama administration, Republicans talked about changing this. Senator Mitch McConnell promised that he would pass a budget every year if and when Republicans gained a Senate majority. But in 2016 there was no budget resolution at all, which led us to the unusual situation we saw last year, where there were two budget resolutions, one to set up the failed Republican health care bill and another, later in the year, to set up tax reform.

That Congress can fail to pass a budget with so little consequence — if anything, it boosted Republicans, by giving them two opportunities to try major partisan legislation — shows what a cynical charade the process has become. The eventual budget resolutions that were passed reveal how disconnected the process has become from actual budgetary considerations. The Republican resolution a year ago was what’s known as a “shell budget” — essentially just a set of instructions that would have allowed the health care bill to be passed with a simple majority vote.

The health care bill, whatever its merits, was not a budget, or a central component of anyone’s conception of what a budget should be. But that’s what the budget resolution was used for. And that is, in many ways, the problem: The budget process is not really about budgeting anymore.

In other years, the budget process has become bogged down, and Congress has kept the government funded through temporary extensions known as continuing resolutions (C.R.s) that fund government operations based on current levels, or rolled everything into an omnibus — or in some cases, a “CRomnibus,” combining a budget omnibus bill and a continuing resolution. It’s kludgy language to describe a kludgy process.

The reliance on an ad hoc system of budgeting has made it even more difficult for Congress to keep the nation’s fiscal house in order. The continuing resolution passed by the House this week would have added about $30 billion to the national debt.

The stalemates that have come to define the budget process have helped set the stage for repeated shutdown showdowns. It is a broken process that has enabled and empowered partisan bad faith by setting up a situation in which everything is riding on a few enormous bills. So lawmakers try to hook other priorities — immigration, say, or health care — to “must pass” legislation in hopes of using the leverage to push them through.

From a purely tactical perspective, pursuing political objectives to the point of a shutdown is rarely an effective strategy. The last government shutdown, in 2013, grew out of Republican opposition to Obamacare, which at the time was an unpopular program. The shutdown started on the same day the health law’s insurance exchanges opened, and crashed — but during the few weeks the government was closed, Obamacare actually grew more popular. I am highly sympathetic to the plight of the Dreamers who have become central to the current fight, but I would not be surprised if this shutdown goes for Democrats the way the last one did for Republicans.

As long as the current system remains in place, and partisan volatility remains high, these showdowns are likely to recur. There are, however, a variety of options for reform, ranging from small tweaks to total overhauls.

James Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute has proposed forcing the White House to be more involved in the process by making the budget resolution a law signed by the president, thus encouraging cross-branch negotiation. Another possibility raised by Molly Reynolds of the Brookings Institution would be to find ways to limit legislative attachments that are mostly meant to make the other party look bad. Moving to a two-year budget process might ease annual pressures. Or, per Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, a ground-up reimagining of the process might be in order.

Reforms won’t be easy under the best of circumstances. And the blame game now playing out in Washington shows that the shutdown itself has become a vehicle for partisan point scoring. The first step toward fixing the system is for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to decide that their priority is to fulfill essential governing responsibilities — and stop treating the shutdown as a game to be won.

Peter Suderman is the managing editor at Reason.com.

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