Washington has so mismanaged the nation ??s finances that in order to save their own skins, the elders of both parties met behind closed doors for weeks and then emerged to join hands in the Rose Garden to support the most regressive tax package in history, and a set of budget priorities that lock us into the status quo for several years all so everyone can get re-elected. [9]
It is, or ought to be, apparent that the National Debt problem will not, and cannot, be solved under the present Constitutional structure, a structure run by entrepreneurial Incumbents and their special-interest clientele: ??the deficit, properly understood, is a surface symptom of more fundamental problems in our political institutions. . . . we cannot expect incumbents in Congress to change the present system. ? [10] Richard Snelling, the former governor of Vermont, summarized:
Four years ago, as chairmen of the National Governors Association, I met with Congressional leaders to discuss the nation ??s economic problems. At one session, within a few minutes ?? time, I heard both Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and James R. Jones, Democrat of Oklahoma, then chairman of the House Budget Committee, declare that the budget and the debt were wheeling out of control. But they said Congress could not act in the face of the combined onslaught of the hundreds of big, powerful special-interest groups based in Washington.
END PART 19: TO BE CONTINUED
FOOTNOTES[1] The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 1991, p. A-16.
[2] War on Waste, Grace Commission, p. 25 (MacMillan: 1984).
[3] Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714 (1986).
[4] The Constitution Under Pressure, p. 127.
[5] Congressional Record, October 3, 1991, H7344 (Representative Dan Burton (R-IN)).
[6] The New York Times, July 14, 1991, p. 10.
[7] Democracy in America, Alexis DeTocqueville, ed. by Richard Heffner (Mentor: 1956), pp. 303-5 (order of sentences separated by ellipses reversed).
[8] The New York Times, July 14, 1991, p. 10.
[9] The Wall Street Journal, September 18, 1991, p. A-16.
[10] 1985 Duke Law Journal 1079 (footnote omitted).
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