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| A conversation now on the shutdown and presidential powers. | ||
| Our guest is University of Maryland School of Public Policy professor Philip Joyce. | ||
| And Professor Joyce, in a recent column, you wrote this in Government Executive. | ||
| When the government shutdown ends, Donald Trump will have succeeded in staging the single biggest expansion of presidential powers in American history because of the single largest shift in the constitutional balance of powers ever. | ||
| Explain. | ||
| Well, I think that the first thing to understand is that government shutdowns, as bad as they are, actually confer a great deal of power to the executive branch in making decisions about, for example, who's going to work and who's not going to work, what programs and policies are going to continue and what programs and policies are not going to continue. | ||
| But you go beyond that. | ||
| You know, he has really taken this opportunity to try to do many of the things that he wanted to do anyway. | ||
| And so he's done something that no other president has ever done, which is to use this as an excuse to lay off employees, for example. | ||
| And then, you know, the particular, in my own view, the sort of particular thing that sort of caused me, gave me pause, I would say, is when he decided to pay the troops using an appropriation that was not for that purpose. | ||
| I have no qualms about paying the troops. | ||
| I think troops should be paid. | ||
| I think everyone should be paid. | ||
| But what he did was took funds that had been made available for one purpose and used them for a completely different purpose. | ||
| So once you have that kind of control over the budget, it's very hard to sort of see where that ends. | ||
| Why is that something that gives a constitutional scholar pause? | ||
| What's the concern there? | ||
| Well, I should say first, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but you know. | ||
| Professor of public policy. | ||
| I don't play one on television, but I will say that, you know, Clause 7 of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says, and I'm going to read this, no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequences of appropriations made by law. | ||
| The fact is that what... | ||
| And who makes those appropriations by law? | ||
| The legislative branch. | ||
| The legislative branch. | ||
| And when the legislative branch makes appropriations, it doesn't just give the president or even the Department of Defense a big lump sum and say spend it however you want. | ||
| There are more than 1,000 appropriation accounts in the federal budget, and those appropriation accounts are first and foremost sort of limits on what can be spent for any particular item. | ||
| And what the Trump administration did in this case was they took an appropriation that was for research and development in the Department of Defense and they used that appropriation to make payments for military personnel. | ||
| And that's not the purpose for which that appropriation was made. | ||
| And so once the president can decide that he wants to take any pot of money and spend it for anything he wants to, that does sort of great damage to the power of the purse. | ||
| And the founders were very concerned that the Congress possessed the power of the purse at the risk of reading another quote. | ||
| I'm going to do it anyway. | ||
| Madison in Federalist 58 said the power of the purse may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people. | ||
| There's a reason that the founders thought that the power of the purse should rest in the Congress. | ||
| And part of the power of the purse resting in the Congress means that Congress should get to decide, of course, with the President's agreement, when the President signs appropriation bills, what money can be spent for. | ||
| But once that's happened, then the President should be bound to spend money in that way. | ||
| Is this just a function of the President's party controlling both the House and the Senate and that if and when it happens that one party, the opposition party, gains control of one chamber, then Congress will reassert itself. | ||
| There will be investigations. | ||
| There will be objections being raised to this. | ||
| I guess that's possible, but you have to ask yourself the question whether the horse is out of the barn at that point. | ||
| And what we don't know is we don't know what the courts are going to rule on this. | ||
| I've been very careful to not just declare that something is unconstitutional because what's constitutional is dependent on what ultimately the Supreme Court says is constitutional. | ||
| So if there's a challenge to this at some point and the Supreme Court says it's okay, that's the point at which we are saying that this could be a permanent shift of power from the Congress to the executive. | ||
| Bring me back to other times when a President's party had super majorities in the House and Senate. | ||
| Lyndon Johnson had super majorities. | ||
| Did this sort of thing happen under Lyndon Johnson? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| This sort of thing did not happen under Lyndon Johnson. | ||
| As far as I'm aware, this kind of thing has not happened under any other president. | ||
| This is one of the things that makes shutdowns end is that people are not able to be paid. | ||
| And in the case of the military, there has always been legal provision made for the military to be paid. | ||
| And so the difference here is that because the House hasn't been in session for more than a month, in part, There was not any legal way to get the, in my opinion, there's not any legal way independent of the Congress acting to get the military paid, which is why they turned to what I think arguably is a sort of extra-legal way to do this. | ||
| Has the Trump administration broken any laws? | ||
| I think it is arguable that the Trump administration has broken a law called the Anti-Deficiency Act. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| The Anti-Deficiency Act was a law that was created in 1870, and it was created in response to the fact that federal agencies had the habit of spending more money than they had and then coming to the Congress and saying, well, make us whole now. | ||
| And so what the Anti-Deficiency Act did is it said, not only are you not allowed to spend money that you don't have, but you're not allowed to spend money on things that that money was not provided for. | ||
| And so when the Trump administration took the research and development funding and used it to pay the troops, you know, people who have studied this more carefully and in a more detailed way than I have argued that that is a clear violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. | ||
| Now, I have read the talking points from the administration about why they think this is legal, and I should be clear that they do think this is legal. | ||
| I should also be clear that I'm not persuaded by their argument. | ||
| What is the Impoundment Control Act of 1974? | ||
| Empoundment Control Act of 1974 is almost the reverse of the Anti-Deficiency Act. | ||
| What the Empoundment Control Act of 1974 says is that a president cannot refuse to spend money that has been appropriated by Congress just because the president doesn't agree with the thing that is being funded. | ||
| And so a lot of the things that, and this, by the way, was passed in response to President Richard Nixon's actions in the late 60s and early 1970s when President Nixon would do exactly that. | ||
| What he would do is he would sign appropriation bills that had been passed by the Congress, and then he would say, well, I don't really like this program, so I'm not going to spend money on it. | ||
| And so the courts stepped in initially to say that there's nothing in the Constitution that permits a president to unilaterally cancel funds or appropriations that have been passed by Congress. | ||
| So what the Empowerment Control Act did was it actually set up a procedure where the president could come in and request that the Congress cancel an appropriation that had been passed. | ||
| But importantly, the Empowerment Control Act says that if the Congress has not acted in response to that within 45 days, then the money has to be sort of freed for obligation. | ||
| So a lot of the things that the administration did sort of early in its term, which, you know, including things like shutting down the Agency for International Development, are arguably violations not only of the law, but also of the Empoundment Control Act. | ||
| If the horse is out of the barn on this power, what is the mechanism to get the horse back in the barn? | ||
| Is the Supreme Court the only way to do it? | ||
| The Supreme Court is a way to do it. | ||
| I think that the horse is out of the barn in part because the Congress has not asserted itself. | ||
| And so waiting for the courts, courts take a long time to act. | ||
| And I think the Congress has not really asserted itself. | ||
| And I think you can sort of understand that Democrats have not been pleased by this, but Democrats don't control either House of Congress. | ||
| I think the fact that the Republicans have not responded to this, in my view, is particularly short-sighted because this is not just a transfer of power from the Congress to President Trump. | ||
| This is a transfer of power from the Congress to the executive. | ||
| And someday there may be another Democratic president. | ||
| And if I was even a partisan Republican in Congress, I would say, do I want the next Democratic president to have this kind of authority? | ||
| What's your view on the job of the budget director and how Russ Vogt has handled that job? | ||
| I think he's a very, very bright man. | ||
| And I think that he has expressed a willingness to kind of find every loophole that he can find in order to try to get the things done that he wants to get done. | ||
| I think what I would say is that he does not feel very bound by the norms that have sort of dictated relationships between the Congress and the President over time. | ||
| I mean, he said in particular that he thought the appropriations process was too bipartisan. | ||
| And of course, as your viewers know, because of the Senate filibuster, they need some Democratic votes in order to either end the shutdown or pass the appropriation bills to begin with. | ||
| He didn't want to have appropriation bills where he was negotiating with Democrats. | ||
| And so I think if you go all the way back to Project 2025 that he was one of the important authors of, none of this is a surprise in terms of this was sort of well documented that this was the plan. | ||
| Of course, it didn't include when there's a government shutdown, we will do X, Y, and Z, but it definitely included a lot of information on exactly how they would approach the job, and in particular, this sort of embracing of what is referred to as unitary executive theory, which essentially says that when the president says that he's going to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, | ||
| it gives the president the authority to do lots of things that other presidents have not thought they had the authority to do. | ||
| Do you think the legislative filibuster is a good thing? | ||
| I think the legislative filibuster can be the only way to sort of protect minority rights sort of in any way, because the minority in the House really has very little power. | ||
| And it is already the case because of budget reconciliation, which we won't get into a long discussion of that unless you want to. | ||
| But because of budget reconciliation, it is already the case that very significant things can be done in the Senate without having to get any votes from the minority party. | ||
| Now, there are limits to budget reconciliation, including the fact that it has to be something that's sort of related to the budget. | ||
| But to kind of expand that to say that there's nothing that you don't need minority support in the Senate for in order to get something passed, you have to kind of remember that the founders, I always tell my students that the system in the Constitution was set up not to promote good things happening, but to prevent bad things from happening. | ||
| And so what the filibuster does is it does put a brake on legislation as it goes through the Congress. | ||
| Is protecting political minority rights in Congress getting in the way of the legislative branch rights projecting its power, as it were, against a creeping executive branch? | ||
| I think it certainly could in a case where the Congress was controlled by a different political party than the president. | ||
| But again, you know. | ||
| The concern is not if Congress is too weak, dump the filibuster, make Congress stronger, and then maybe they'll be on more equal footing with the president. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| I mean, I think you have to think of you have you have to think about all possible situations. | ||
| And in a situation where the presidency and the Congress are both controlled by the same political party, then what it does is it removes any breaks. | ||
| that might be on the president. | ||
| Professor Philip Joyce is our guest of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. | ||
| You can see the School of Public Policy's work, spp.umd.edu. | ||
| His recent piece, and the focus of this conversation, ran in government executive, the headline, how the president expanded his power without a government. | ||
| It's by Professor Joyce and Donald Kettle. | ||
| Who is that? | ||
| Donald Kettle is former dean of the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, now a professor emeritus. | ||
| How long have you been studying public policy? | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| Well, I started, I've been studying public policy probably since I got my PhD, which started in 1986. | ||
| And then I eventually went to work for five years for the Congressional Budget Office, which frankly was where I sort of got immersed into it. | ||
| I mean, I thought I knew what I was doing until I got there. | ||
| And then I discovered, you know, day by day that there were lots of nuances that I was not aware of. | ||
| And since then, I've been sort of teaching and writing, especially about the federal budget, which is both an interesting and depressing way to spend my life. | ||
| What role does the Congressional Budget Office have during a shutdown and in the lead up to a shutdown? | ||
| I would say not very much, and certainly not during a shutdown, because what the Congressional Budget Office mostly does is responds to legislation that is being considered by the Congress. | ||
| And, you know, as we said, the House has not been in session for more than a month. | ||
| And so, you know, really the Congressional Budget Office exists to provide information to the Congress. | ||
| And the Congress can then choose what it wants to do with that information. | ||
| And in particular, the Congressional Budget Office has been telling the Congress for a long time that the deficit is big and the debt is big and even presenting the Congress with information on how it is that they might take action in order to reduce the debt. | ||
| But in the end, they have no power to do anything other than provide information. | ||
| And they have in past shutdowns communicated to the Congress, for example, what kind of damage the shutdown is doing to the economy. | ||
| And I have not seen them do that in this particular case, but I assume that they will at some point. | ||
| How does the Congressional Budget Office stay independent? | ||
| They're often called the nonpartisan scorekeepers. | ||
| But when you get down to a budgeting fight, one or the other side will often, when the Congressional Budget Office puts out some numbers that they don't like, will say, well, they're partisan. | ||
| They're using the wrong numbers. | ||
| Well, a former director of CBO told me once that he knew he was doing a good job if he had as many Republicans screaming at him as Democrats screaming at him. | ||
| Is that Weigel, the former? | ||
| No, in particular case, this was Bob Reischauer, who was the director that I mostly worked for. | ||
| But part of that goes all the way back to Alice Rublin, who was the first director of CBO, who really, she set up the agency from scratch. | ||
| There was no sort of playbook for how you would set up this agency. | ||
| And she decided very early on that they would not make recommendations. | ||
| Somebody once said to me, if you ask CBO how much something costs, we'll tell you how much it costs. | ||
| If you ask us if it's a good idea, we'll tell you how much it costs. | ||
| And so future directors have sort of followed that path. | ||
| And I think they're very concerned that they not sort of appear to lean too far to one side or the other. | ||
| But it's always going to be the case that if they come out with an estimate of a cost and one or the other side doesn't like it, then they're going to be accused of being partisan. | ||
| I mean, my experience, you know, I wrote a book about CBO, so it's a very dangerous question to ask me, but my experience and also everything that I've sort of observed suggests to me that they try very hard to sort of play it right down the middle. | ||
| If you won't name it, I will. | ||
| The Congressional Budget Office is the name of the book, Honest Numbers, Power, and Policymaking, published in 2011. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And your other book? | ||
| Well, I have a couple other books. | ||
| One of them is called Public Budgeting Systems, which is really a budgeting textbook. | ||
| And then there's another book called Government Performance, Why Management Matters. | ||
| Legislative Branch Power, Executive Branch Power, Budgeting Issues, all topics we can chat about with Professor Philip Joyce with us for about another 25 minutes this morning. | ||
| Phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, you know the numbers. | ||
| Go ahead and call us in, and we will start on the Republican line. | ||
| Luis Fredericksburg, Virginia, good morning. | ||
| You're on with Professor Joyce. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| The President at one time used to propose a budget. | ||
| They would send a budget to the Congress, and the Congress went through the budget and either gave the President what he asked for or didn't. | ||
| Now it seems that Congress is writing their budget. | ||
| They're tearing up the President's budget, who is elected by all the people, the executive. | ||
| And it seemed to me as if the past 30 years or more, I don't know, I've been watching it for forever, 40 years or more. | ||
| And it seems as if the Congress wants the power of the budget, not just the purse. | ||
| They want to create their own way of governing. | ||
| And they're not elected by the whole country. | ||
| So how do we go back to where the president submits a budget and the Congress then takes up his budget or her budget, whichever, and then sends it to the president. | ||
|
unidentified
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And any extra things that the Congress wants, they should be negotiating with the executive to see if they could work out a compromise on what each side wants. | |
| Luis got the point. | ||
| Professor Joyce. | ||
| So I'm going to resist giving my federal budgeting course in five minutes. | ||
| But I love this question. | ||
| And partly I love this question because I think we should be clear that the president does submit a budget. | ||
| The president is supposed to submit a budget proposal by the first Monday in February every year. | ||
| And then the Congress has eight months, roughly, if the president submits the budget on time. | ||
| Now, I should say this year, President Trump did not submit a full budget. | ||
| President Trump basically just submitted the numbers for the appropriations bills that he wanted the appropriations committees to work with. | ||
| The caller is correct that the president used to have significantly more power in the budget than he does now. | ||
| What really changed that was the 1974 Budget and Empoundment Control Act. | ||
| This conversation we were having earlier about impoundment, that was sort of the proximate cause of the Congress wanting to reassert its power in the budget process. | ||
| But at the same time, they also set up this device called the budget resolution, and they set up budget committees. | ||
| And for the specific reason of the Congress being able to respond to the president's budget, I think this sort of notion of whether we think that the Congress is a more democratic body or the president is sort of more democratic. | ||
| It is true that the president is supposed to represent the whole country, but members of Congress represent 435 congressional districts in 50 states. | ||
| And so a lot of people would say, well, that's really a reflection of democracy. | ||
| I think it is absolutely the case that we have really fallen down in terms of what the collar mentions about negotiation between the president and the Congress. | ||
| I mean, why are we in this situation we're in right now? | ||
| It's not because the Democrats haven't voted for the continuing resolution. | ||
| That's not the initial cause. | ||
| The initial cause is all the appropriation bills weren't passed and signed into law prior to the beginning of the fiscal year. | ||
| And oh, by the way, that hasn't happened in almost 30 years. | ||
| And so neither side is bathed in glory here. | ||
| And I think that we need to sort of recognize that when we say we want to return to a system that's more functional, that would be a system where the president submitted a budget and then the Congress engaged with the president and ultimately everything was passed by the beginning of the fiscal year. | ||
| Since the modern budgeting process has been set up, Congress has passed all its required appropriations measures, all 12, on time four times in 1977, 89, 95, and 97. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why do we still have this process if it doesn't work? | ||
| It's a really good question. | ||
| You know, my own view is that this is not a process problem. | ||
| That is, we don't fail to pass appropriation bills on time because we don't have a good process. | ||
| We fail to pass appropriation bills on time because it's a failure of our politics. | ||
| I think the failure of the budget process is just a reflection of a failure of our politics. | ||
| And if you can tell me how to make our politics work better, then please do. | ||
| I think a lot of this is a story about polarization and about partisanship. | ||
| And I'm always a little skeptical of people who think that if only we reform the budget process, we'll get to better budget outcomes. | ||
| But has this, and this is the chart from the Pew Research Service showing the four times that Congress has passed all of its budget appropriations bills on time. | ||
| Is this leading to the original problem that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation? | ||
| Is this as much a part of it of an expanding executive branch as anything else? | ||
| Yeah, I think it is absolutely the case that the Congress has failed. | ||
| You're not going to do the job. | ||
| And if the Congress fails, power abhors a vacuum, right? | ||
| And if Congress fails, then what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| What's going to happen is that power is going to shift to the executive branch. | ||
| Now, I don't want to suggest that there aren't cases in here where the unwillingness of a president to negotiate with the Congress is not also part of the Professor Joyce, taking your phone calls. | ||
| D is waiting in Silver Spring, Maryland. | ||
| Independent Line D. Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, good morning, C-SPAN. | |
| Thank you for your work. | ||
| Our choices now are between a silverback and a grizzly. | ||
| It's no easy way to deal with things. | ||
| It's going to be hurt no matter which way you turn. | ||
| The thing of it is fundamentally the system is just broken at the bottom. | ||
| So it's broken at the bottom. | ||
| And the people that have the power, in Trump's case, to take advantage and make the rules as he pleases, you have to blame both parties that they have allowed the country to come to this. | ||
| I blame both of them. | ||
| And this is the result of it. | ||
| We need to move to the middle. | ||
| We need some strong moderates coming into the arena to straighten this country out. | ||
| Otherwise, America is not going to work. | ||
| C-SPAN, thank you for what you do. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Dee, thanks for the call. | ||
| Professor Joyce. | ||
| You have really good callers with really good questions. | ||
| So this, you know, I could not agree more. | ||
| You know, I'm not a political scientist, just like I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but I will say that the work that political scientists have done suggests that exactly what the caller says, which is that we don't have any moderates anymore. | ||
| That essentially we have gone to the extremes. | ||
| And there used to be when things worked better, there were these people called moderate, even conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. | ||
| And they weren't the majority, but they were important because they would sort of swing back and forth and kind of help to get things done. | ||
| And now we increasingly just have votes that are wholly partisan. | ||
| Every Democrat says one thing and every Republican says something else. | ||
| And that looks more like a parliamentary system, right? | ||
| That's not sort of the way our system, I think, was set up or sort of functions well. | ||
| And it's not making things better when we have this kind of rampant redistricting because what redistricting tends to do is it tends to eliminate these moderate districts. | ||
| It tends to eliminate the districts where sometimes a Republican will get elected and sometimes a Democrat will get elected. | ||
| And again, I think those people were very important in terms of the ability to get things done, even though they were not in the majority. | ||
| Who is the best deal maker, the person who forced that in modern political times in your mind? | ||
| Well, if you define modern as, I don't know, the last 75 years, I would say Lynn Johnson. | ||
| You know, when he was the, when he was a majority leader of the United States Senate, you know, now he had pretty healthy majorities in part of that time. | ||
| But, you know, but even when we're talking about the budget, I was just at a conference recently where there was a discussion of the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, which came directly before we had four years of budget surpluses. | ||
| That was largely negotiated between John Spratt, who at that point was the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. | ||
| South Carolina, I think. | ||
| From South Carolina, thank you. | ||
| And Pete Domenici from a Republican from New Mexico who was the chair of the budget committee in the Senate. | ||
| And they got together and they basically said, you know, we've got to do something about this. | ||
| And the this was the federal deficit. | ||
| You know, now you don't have people from different parties that are initiating those conversations, right? | ||
| They didn't agree with each other on how it was that they would do this. | ||
| But what they did say is this is a problem and something needs to be done about it. | ||
| You said we have good callers. | ||
| We've got good folks who follow along on social media every day as well. | ||
| Politically homeless Tony, here's his question for you. | ||
| If the executive has outsized power, it isn't it because the Congress has strayed from the original rationale for a federal government and tried to do too much. | ||
| Coincidentally, this has led to $38 trillion and rising debt. | ||
| I think, well, there's a couple ways to look at that. | ||
| One way is the way he's describing that, which is essentially the federal government now does more than it sort of did initially. | ||
| And then you get this sort of question, what's the proper role of the federal government? | ||
| That's a reasonable conversation to have. | ||
| But another way to look at that, at the debt, is that the debt is the cumulative effect of the fact that we have more government than we have been willing to pay for. | ||
| Now, you can go after that in either direction. | ||
| You can say, well, we should do less, and that would reduce the debt. | ||
| Or you can say, well, if we really want to have all of these programs, we need to pay for them. | ||
| And that the big, you know, I think one of the real sort of problems here, even in this kind of shutdown debate, is that the focus is on the portion of the budget that is not growing. | ||
| So basically, appropriated spending accounts for about 25% of the budget. | ||
| The other 75% of the budget, which is, by the way, not affected by the shutdown, is interest on the debt and so-called mandatory spending programs. | ||
| And those mandatory spending programs are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security primarily. | ||
| And what those programs have in common is that we have said that there are particular people who are eligible to receive funds for those programs. | ||
| And as long as they continue to meet those eligibility requirements, they will continue to get money from the federal government. | ||
| Because we have an aging population, because people are living longer, great for them that they're living longer, not great for the federal budget, right? | ||
| Those programs just sort of continue and they continue to grow. | ||
| And we are facing a point in time when we are not going to have enough money in the Social Security Trust Funds in order to make all the payments that have been promised, which to me is just sort of a microcosm of the larger problem that I was describing, which is that we have decided that we want to provide benefits sort of in excess of the revenues that come in to pay for them. | ||
| In the more immediate timeframe, what's your best guess for how it win the shutdown ends? | ||
| Yeah, I wrote down all the dates that I had heard and why. | ||
| And so I'll give you all of them, right? | ||
| I mean, one is that I heard your conversation just before I came on with the Times White House reporter or the Time White House reporter. | ||
| One is October 31st is another date for a military payday. | ||
| It's not entirely clear whether they can quote find the money to make that payment. | ||
| The November 1st sort of snap deadline, another date I've heard as well, not until after the elections in Virginia and New Jersey to kind of see what happens coming out of those. | ||
| Maybe it makes one side or the other feel like that they want to compromise. | ||
| Or the existing CR, ironically, the existing CR that there's been a discussion that the Democrats and Senate should just vote for this. | ||
| It expires on November 21st, right? | ||
| And so let's say they voted for it tomorrow. | ||
| There's still then another looming deadline on November 21st. | ||
| And so that suggests to me that this problem needs to be solved not just between now and November 21st, but sort of in the long run. | ||
| So the other date I heard is Thanksgiving. | ||
| I don't know why Thanksgiving. | ||
| Maybe people don't want to be here talking about the shutdown over Thanksgiving. | ||
| Holidays do have a way of moving things sometimes around here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Time for a couple more calls with Professor Philip Joyce of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. | ||
| By the way, if you stick around here after 10 a.m., it's probably usually a couple minutes after three or four, Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to come out for his Monday press conference. | ||
| Reporters are already gathering in the room. | ||
| So we're going to take you there when he does, and we're going to stick with Professor Joyce until then. | ||
| And we're going to hear from Clayton out of Philadelphia, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Two questions. | ||
| First question would be: how does the destruction of government property, namely the destruction of the East Wing, how does that affect the budget? | ||
| And two, what would an Everett Dirksen have to say about the budget as we speak? | ||
| Take him in whichever order you want. | ||
| Well, let me talk about Everett Dirksen first because that would actually have been a good answer to your previous question about when it was that we actually had leaders that actually led. | ||
| You're saying there's a reason that there's a building named after him? | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And so I think Senator Dirksen is a great example. | ||
| I was not in the Congress when Senator Dirksen was in the Congress, but I did sort of watch prior to that. | ||
| And I think he's a great example of someone who is sort of willing to work across the aisle. | ||
| And I think, first, I think he would be appalled at the Congress ceding its power to the president in this way, you know. | ||
| But secondly, I think that he'd be kind of on the front lines of trying to say, well, look, let's get something done. | ||
| In terms of the White House, I have not, I will admit, I have not looked into what it is. | ||
| What I've heard is that there's private money that's coming in that's sort of paying for this. | ||
| That to me is sort of not sufficient in the sense that private money coming into the government still normally would have to be appropriated by the Congress. | ||
| That it's quite fine for somebody to decide. | ||
| Maybe you would even consider it patriotic for somebody to decide that they want to give money to the government. | ||
| But that doesn't change Clause 7 of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution that says no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequences of appropriations made by law. | ||
| By the way, this is the same issue with the $130 million that's allegedly going to be given to pay the troops. | ||
| It's just fine for somebody to decide to take their money and give it to the government. | ||
| But what they can't really do is say, and you can only spend it for this, right? | ||
| When I pay my taxes, I don't say, well, I'm going to pay my taxes, but I really only want my tax money to be used for sort of X, Y, or Z. | ||
| It goes into the Treasury, and then the Congress appropriates the money. | ||
| So it feels to me like, again, not having looked at this in great detail, it feels to me like if this ultimately is going to have no effect on the federal budget, that the way that should happen is that the donation should be made and then there should be an appropriation made in order to do whatever renovations are going to be done to the White House. | ||
| What would be the logical extreme of that happening? | ||
| People purchasing certain legislation? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think that I think when you basically said that anybody could just sort of come in and privately fund whatever kind of activity they wanted, then And in the end, what that means is that you have something that you think the government should be doing that's going to benefit you in some way. | ||
| And you just sort of come in and you say, Well, I'm going to set this money aside. | ||
| It's not that the Congress, that there isn't money that is set aside that can only be used for a particular purpose. | ||
| For example, if you pay a fee to go into a national park, all of that money goes to offset the cost of the National Park Service. | ||
| But that's because the law says that. | ||
| That's because the Congress has sort of permitted that to happen. | ||
| So the Congress also could make a sort of blanket permission for money like that to be used for that purpose without having to kind of go through the process of appropriating the money. | ||
| But again, that would start with the Congress having said it could be done in that way. | ||
| It doesn't just happen because someone woke up one morning and decided they wanted to give money. | ||
| What about gifts, perhaps in the form of an airplane to become the new Air Force One? | ||
| Well, again, my understanding is that there are rules around gifts. | ||
| And again, I haven't looked at this in detail, but I think what all of these things have in common is that there are established processes, and those established processes should be followed. | ||
| Time for just a couple more calls here, maybe before the speaker comes out for his Monday press conference. | ||
| Out to Astoria, Oregon. | ||
| Mike, Republican, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I see the Democrats blame the Republicans, the Republicans blame the Democrats. | |
| I blame the American people. | ||
| We keep electing the same people into the Senate, into the Congress, and we expect something different from them. | ||
| I mean, we need change. | ||
| We need term limits to get some of these older people that are so stuck in their ways out of the office. | ||
| That's about all I have to say. | ||
| How would you respond? | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| So, first, I was in Astoria last spring, and it's beautiful. | ||
| So, congratulations for living there. | ||
| I've never been there. | ||
| I think that it is largely sort of correct that we have to ask the question: what should we, as the public, do if we don't like what our elected officials are doing? | ||
| And we do have the ability to sort of vote them out of office. | ||
| And it would be hard to get into a long sort of discussion of term limits, but I do think that there's a reasonable point of view out there that says that maybe part of the problem is that we have sort of people who are career politicians who may be sort of disconnected from what the public sort of wants. | ||
| But on the other hand, there are people who say we have term limits, they're called elections. | ||
| If you don't like the people who are in office, you can vote them out. | ||
| Try to get this in before Speaker Johnson comes out. | ||
| Judy in Kentucky says, Do you think AI could help with the budget? | ||
| Well, we should ask it. | ||
| I'd probably have an answer. | ||
| I think it would have an answer. | ||
| I fear that its answer would not get it elected. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Because I think if we asked AI a question about the budget, what AI would say, I'm just guessing, is looks to me like the only way out of this problem, meaning the $38 trillion debt, would be to both raise taxes and to cut spending mostly on these mandatory spending programs. | ||
| There's a reason we haven't done either one of those things because they're both politically unpopular. | ||
| But we have an entire political party out there that is sort of unalterably opposed to raising taxes. | ||
| That's the Republicans. | ||
| We have another party out there that is pretty resistant to cutting these mandatory spending programs. | ||
| That's the Democrats. | ||
| In my view, having looked at the budget, and I would hope that AI would agree with me, we have to do both of those things, right? | ||
| We can't get there from here by focusing on the 15% of the budget that we've been focused on. | ||
| Stephen Gedden, David, from Flemington, New Jersey, Independent. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| You're on with Professor Joyce. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, and thank you for taking my call. | |
| In regard to Russell Vogue in Project 2025, one of the big targets, and it's always a target for the conservatives, Head Start. | ||
| But I want to point out that the big problem in Head Start is not whether there's Head Start or there's not Head Start. | ||
| It's getting the community action programs that get these multi-million dollars in grants from the federal government to run it. | ||
| The federal government needs to run Head Start directly. | ||
| What the Community Action Program does centered here in central New Jersey that runs the Flemington Head Start is it impoverishes its workers, paying them barely minimum wage so they can't qualify for SNAP. | ||
| They can't qualify for Medicaid. | ||
| And the executives of the Community Action Program, and they're like this everywhere in America, they take millions of dollars every year under the shill of Head Start, and they pay themselves massive salaries and they impoverish these people going out into these homes. | ||
| Flemington is one-third impoverished people were below the poverty line. | ||
| They seized on Flemington, New Jersey the minute it fell below the poverty line, the community action program headquartered in New Jersey and Phillipsburg, and they exploit these workers. | ||
| David, I got your point. | ||
| We're running short on time. | ||
| Let me try to get Professor Joyce a chance to respond. | ||
| Yeah, real quick. | ||
| So you know far more about Head Start than I do. | ||
| I would just sort of point out that your proposal to have the federal government sort of take over Head Start directly, I would assume that that means that you're not in any way in favor of what the Trump administration is arguing, which is eliminating the Department of Education, because this would basically be an expansion of the responsibilities of the Department of Education. | ||
| And it's always the case in any case where you have sort of a contractual relationship, you can end up in a situation like you described. | ||
| Well, we'll have to end it there. | ||
| Speaker Johnson, coming out, let me thank Professor Philip Joyce, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a professor there. | ||
| His article is in govexecgovexec.com. | ||
| Appreciate it very much. | ||
| Thanks very much for having me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live form inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington and across the country. | |
| Coming up Tuesday morning, we'll talk about the government shutdown with Politico Congressional Reporter Nicholas Wu, then the Economic Security Projects Mike Konzel, and the Mercatus Center's Veronique de Rougy on Trump administration economic policies and their impact on the overall economy. | ||
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