Word: grammes
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Washington optimists--and there still are a few--like to view Gramm-Rudman as nothing more than a device for applying pressure. As they see it, when the pressure gets high enough a few months from now--meaning when enough special- interest groups rise in rebellion against the threatened cuts--there will occur, as if by magic, what former Budget Director David Stockman used to call "the big fix." This comes when everybody reluctantly agrees to both some budget cuts and some tax increases. One formula being mentioned is known as 20-20-20, meaning $20 billion in new taxes...
...much dissension within each House and within each party. In the White House, there is serious question whether Reagan fully understands what is involved. There is also a dearth of both acumen and independent thinking around him. If this analysis is correct, there is good reason to believe that Gramm-Rudman will turn out to be either a means of ravaging many Government functions, including quite legitimate ones, or a malign illusion that merely defers the real day of judgment on the deficit...
First, though, there remains the possibility that the judiciary will save Congress from itself. "There is no way this thing can be made constitutional," says Alan Morrison, the attorney handling the suit to stop Gramm-Rudman. "It's diseased." But when the case was argued before the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington on Jan. 10, Judge Antonin Scalia outspokenly challenged Morris' view that Congress could not delegate its funding authority. "Congress often delegates to the Executive difficult questions that it would rather not grapple with," Judge Scalia said. "I don't see how you can say that Congress hasn...
...there are perfectly sensible people in Washington who see the act as primarily a way of making all branches of Government rethink what the Government does and what it is willing to pay for. "We need a reordering of the relationship between the Federal Government and the people," says Gramm, and that is a view that many can endorse...
...back over the long accumulation of deficits, which stretches back to the last balanced budget in 1969, Florida's Democratic Senator Lawton Chiles acknowledges that "we always seem to come up with a new slogan to patch over gaps in our willpower." And looking ahead to the dangers that Gramm-Rudman may bring, Wisconsin's Republican Senator Rudy Boschwitz says, "It is perhaps a little mindless, but it may be the only way out of the morass." All of which is another way of asking, If Gramm-Rudman is too arbitrary, what is going to get the Government...