Rudolph G. Penner Quotes
Congress keeps outwitting its rules.
Congress keeps passing rules to prevent overspending and unbalanced budgets. Then they cleverly find loopholes in their own rules or in cases like the Iraq War and Prescription Drug coverage, whoever controls the Congress decides to n spend the money but not count it as an expenditure so they will not spend more than the rules allow. Except that they do.
Rudolph G. Penner, Director, Congressional Budget Office, Former CBO Budget Directors Seminar-SPAN Radio, June 11, 2011
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
His main reason for believing this is that all appropriations bills must be initiated by the House of Representatives. Lobbyists therefore often give the House more attention than the Senate.
In response to Administration tactics to delay a vote on the Church-Cooper proposal to limit American involvement in Cambodia after June 30, 1970, Senator Cotton asserted:
President Abraham Lincoln had pocket vetoed his own party's reconstruction bill in the midst of an election year.
This notion seems to have first been expressed by Edward S. Corwin in 1940
There was much New England dissatisfaction with the disproportionate power held by the Southern states as a result of counting three-fifths of the slave population for apportioning Congressional seats. In addition they were disproportionately hurt by the War of 1812 and the Embargo on trade with England. Secession was proposed but failed to get a majority. A number of proposed Constitutional amendments were voted upon. The super-majority herein required would have diminished their vulnerability to Southern power.
If a party controls one of the two houses of Congress, they can block any legislation. But governing involves passing legislation, and in our bi-cameral Congress, control of one house is not sufficient to pass legislation.
The objective of a large proportion of the Congress then was not to improve the nation or even pass legislation, but to preserve their ideology and attack and weaken the other party. Compromise for example is probably the best legislative practice, but that Congress had a substantial number of Tea Party and other ultra conservatives who believed that any compromise at all was an immoral abandonment of principle.
Rudolph G. Penner (born 1936 in Amherstburg, Ontario) is a Canadian-American economist who was the director of the United States Congressional Budget Office from September 1, 1983, through April 28, 1987.
