If, for example, citizens of one city got their legislators to press Congress to spend money to improve their harbor, those legislators might run up against other legislators whose constituents would resent that cost.
For more than a century and a half after the ratification of the Constitution, practical considerations forced members of Congress to legislate in ways that highlighted their responsibility for unpopular consequences.
As a candidate for president in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt criticized the deficits incurred under President Herbert Hoover and vowed to cut spending "To accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the federal government." Under Roosevelt, the country did run large deficits, but it also faced grave emergencies-the Great Depression and then World War II. Even so, in passing Social Security in 1935, Roosevelt and Congress took responsibility for imposing taxes that would raise funds fully sufficient to pay for the future benefits then promised.
In the Clean Air Act of 1970, Congress granted all citizens a supposedly ironclad right to healthy air by the end of the 1970s and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to impose the burdens necessary to make it so.
Congress and the president could take responsibility for unpopular consequences with a simple gesture: every year, they could put in every mailbox estimates of the annual cost to the average family of the future tax increases or spending cuts needed to keep government solvent over the long run, and how much that cost has changed given the action or inaction of Congress over the past year.
Another plank of the Honest Deal Act would require Congress to take responsibility for regulations.
What Congress could do instead is enact a proposal made by FDR's guru of regulation, James Landis.
https://www.city-journal.org/lets-make-congress-more-accountable
For more than a century and a half after the ratification of the Constitution, practical considerations forced members of Congress to legislate in ways that highlighted their responsibility for unpopular consequences.
As a candidate for president in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt criticized the deficits incurred under President Herbert Hoover and vowed to cut spending "To accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the federal government." Under Roosevelt, the country did run large deficits, but it also faced grave emergencies-the Great Depression and then World War II. Even so, in passing Social Security in 1935, Roosevelt and Congress took responsibility for imposing taxes that would raise funds fully sufficient to pay for the future benefits then promised.
In the Clean Air Act of 1970, Congress granted all citizens a supposedly ironclad right to healthy air by the end of the 1970s and ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to impose the burdens necessary to make it so.
Congress and the president could take responsibility for unpopular consequences with a simple gesture: every year, they could put in every mailbox estimates of the annual cost to the average family of the future tax increases or spending cuts needed to keep government solvent over the long run, and how much that cost has changed given the action or inaction of Congress over the past year.
Another plank of the Honest Deal Act would require Congress to take responsibility for regulations.
What Congress could do instead is enact a proposal made by FDR's guru of regulation, James Landis.
https://www.city-journal.org/lets-make-congress-more-accountable
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