We often despair that neither party represents the interests of fiscal discipline these days, or even competent and accountable governance. It’s clearly too much to ask that we get to a balanced budget, since we haven’t even seen one attempted in nearly 30 years — and even that used budgetary gimmicks.

Without a constitutional amendment, Congress will never budget properly within the limits of national revenue, and without an Article V convention, we won’t get an amendment that requires it.

As for competent and accountable governance, that will likely require an Article V convention as well. And the first amendment to service that goal should be an end to sessions of Congress on Election Day or shortly thereafter. The use of lame-duck sessions to move major policies — and especially budgeting decisions — has gone from abusive to scandalous.

Cato’s analysis of the ludicrous Senate omnibus bill makes this point obvious. We haven’t had a regular-order budget in over a decade, and the omnibus process has become the new normal. Not only has that led to rushed legislation that elected officials can’t read first before voting on the bill, it enables all sorts of unaccountable policy decisions.

The spending levels, as Cato points out, are only the least of the issues with this omnibus bill. The bump in discretionary spending is 13%, well above the inflation rate and certainly above the expected levels of increase in revenue. That comes on top of previous “emergency spending,” such as Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) in March 2021 and which is still being distributed, and the $800 billion so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” (IRA) from August that purportedly fixed the problems created by the ARP. As both episodes of irresponsible spending show, Congress doesn’t need a lame-duck session to make bad spending choices. It’s likely that we would have seen significant levels of spending increases even in a regular-order budget in the current political context.

However, the manner in which this omnibus got crafted matters. The spending decisions in this bill were largely made by two senators who won’t be in Congress for the next session: Senate Appropriations chair Pat Leahy and ranking member Richard Shelby, both retiring. A significant amount of support for this bill comes from people who either retired or lost control of the House last month, especially Nancy Pelosi, who will nonetheless now control the outcome for this budget. Voters already issued a demonstration of no-confidence in House Democrat leadership, and yet they’re driving the agenda via the lame-duck session.

What else will the lame-duck Congress do after voters sent a demand for at least some change in direction and accountability for the failures of the 117th Session?

• Congress would waive required PAYGO spending cuts.
• Congress would waste taxpayer dollars on thousands of earmarks.
• Congress would enact other legislation that is not related to appropriations, such as the Secure 2.0 Act. 

And finally, Congress will do all of this in a bill that runs well over 4,000 pages, in a timeframe that assures that no member will actually read it. That creates all sorts of room for even more mischief, more malign Easter eggs, more spending and shadow policymaking that won’t see the light of day for taxpayer scrutiny. My favorite, thus far, is the money appropriated to Customs and Border Protection that has language that specifically prohibits CBP from using it to strengthen, um … border security. YMMV, however; maybe you see the chauffeur for the IRS commissioner as more egregious and/or laughable. Take your pick — it’s a target-rich environment.

Perhaps these same policies would have been added to appropriations bills in a regular-order process. However, at least that would have allowed for more time and scrutiny on spending bills, rather than this secret spending colossus now being forced down the throats of members without any time for review. At one time we scoffed at Nancy Pelosi’s insistence that Congress had to pass a massive bill to find out what’s in it. Thirteen years later, that’s the norm, and the ability to kick these issues into a lame-duck session omnibus vehicle only incentivizes this nonsense further.

This is not self-governance by elected representatives of the people. This is governance by an elite cadre, designed for the least amount of transparency and accountability possible. Cooperating with it for expediency’s sake is tantamount to surrendering the Danegeld in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem.

It is time for the sovereign states to intercede and bring this circus to a halt. An Article V convention needs to propose a new constitutional amendment to end lame-duck sessions, requiring a new and accountable Congress to take over immediately rather than two months after the fact. A balanced budget must be part of the proposals for states to ratify as amendments, one that preferably forces regular-order budgeting at the penalty of loss of wages and staff during government shutdowns to enforce new provisions for responsible governance.