Word: grammes
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...snipped when he wasn't selling wholesale. Similarly, JPK puts forward no vision of a brighter, fairer country led by responsive lawmakers committed to social justice. He instead opts to try to out-technocrat the conservatives, following the same defeatist logic that led Uncle Teddy '54 to support Gramm-Rudman's prescription for automatic budget cuts...
...Gramm-Rudman sets up a series of targets for reducing the federal deficit to zero by 1991. If Congress and the President cannot meet those targets, automatic cuts in about half the budget go into effect. The Comptroller General is to draw up the list of exactly how much must be cut and clarify any ambiguities about just which agencies would be affected. Synar's suit raised two questions: Can Congress lawfully delegate its power of the purse at all? And can it confer that much authority on the Comptroller General...
...meet the deficit targets would be calculated and voted into effect by a joint resolution of Congress, subject to presidential veto. The big catch: it was precisely the inability of President and Congress to agree on any plan that would dramatically reduce deficits that drove them to support Gramm-Rudman in the first place...
...unnerving even to the Republican leadership of the Senate. Indeed, the current year's deficit of $203 billion is greater than the combined total of all discretionary domestic appropriations. Yet this time Congress cannot heedlessly dismiss the President's proposals. Looming in the background is the specter of the Gramm-Rudman law, passed last year, which threatens automatic cuts if the deficit is not reduced to $144 billion in 1987 and to zero by 1991. On Friday a three-judge federal panel declared the triggering mechanism of that law unconstitutional. But pending an appeal to the Supreme Court, its provisions...
Well, sort of. Unlike Reagan's previous four budgets, this one was not quite dead on arrival. The proposals, however unpalatable, must serve as a starting point for compromise. Even if the Supreme Court agrees that the mechanics of Gramm-Rudman are constitutionally flawed, there will be--and certainly should be--pressure to meet the deficit ceilings it mandates. "Whatever the outcome," said Reagan in his weekly radio address Saturday, "we intend to go forward with our plan to bring the federal budget into balance by 1991." In one respect, Reagan's 1987 blueprint is less draconian than expected...