“It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.” Alice…in Wonderland
In my Washington Times Community Pages column, I’ve been posting an interview/primer on the budget process with Norm Ornstein, congressional scholar and political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute. If you haven’t read those, you should read them before continuing. Part 1 and Part 2. And now the last section of the interview is a […]
Yesterday I posted the first part of my interview with Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In that section of the interview, he laid out the process as it’s supposed to run: Congress passes a budget resolution in April or May. Every year. Concurrently each house of Congress passes 12 appropriations […]
Actually, they have more than one job, but allocating spending is a big one. To wit, Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says, “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall […]
Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Washington for the summer, more scandals and reports of government misconduct are circling. This time, the Justice Department has been caught having secretly subpoenaed the phone records of Associated Press reporters. In investigating a leak over a story on North Korea’s nuclear program, the department searched the […]
Last week, Amy Otto posted this interesting post on liberty and abortion at Pocket Full of Liberty. I agree with a great deal of it, but there is a pesky area of disagreement that keeps coming up between libertarians and pro-life activists: namely that legislation is the wrong approach. So I’ve got a response to […]
The Texas legislature meets every other year for 140 days (in regular session, special sessions can also be called.) This limits the mischief they can achieve, but it also means that all the damage they do inflict happens fast and furiously. I fully intended to be aware of all the goings-on in Austin this year, […]