http://clerk.house.gov/index.aspx
http://www.senate.gov/reference/office/secretary_of_senate.htm
As the 113th Congress of the United States convenes, much is still left to be done. As the 112th Congress convened, there is the highest level of disdain for those who worked, or failed to work to accomplish the work necessary to avoid another economic catastrophe. Many representatives from within the House of Congress will point to the opposite sides of the aisle. Others will point to opposite houses of the Senate and Congress, with no shortage of disproportionate blame for President Obama. Blame, blame, blame. Regardless of who gets the blame, or who is actually responsible for what failed to be accomplished, the 112th Congress will go down as one of the least successful legislative bodies in American history. President Obama, however, will come out no worse for the wear. He has little to worry about as long as Congress continues to do their version of a battle-royale for control and power. But President Obama is not to be held blameless either. He has as much to produce in his second term, irrespective of his lame duck status.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America
As I reflected over the beginning of the 113th Congress, I was reminded of a time during my lifetime in America history, where there was once a compulsion to be accountable. The time that stands out to me was in 1994. The Republicans, led by then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, was determined to get a handle on federal spending, cutting taxes, and presenting themselves to the American people, so much so, they presented and signed the Contract with America. In hindsight, it was well orchestrated, and done well enough, that it was just a matter of which political party came to the party to dance, or to put it in another analogy, which party came to fight. The problem between the fight of then, and the fight of now, is that it appears that the issue is which party wants to fight and what is it that they are actually fighting for.
The common theme that Democrats and Republicans seem to try to overcome is, which one is fighting for the rich, and which party is not. There was a clear indication by the 112th Congress that the business of America, as a whole, was not America's business as to how it was to be handled. The message to the American tax payers, if not the American voters, was essentially that Congress can do as it damned well please, and that America, well, it better get a clue.
The following highlights are taken from the website: The Heritage. (http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/the-contract-with-america-implementing-new-ideas-in-the-us).
Many instances will come back to bite Republicans and Democrats from this past and current administration. Among those things, where parties stood on Affordable Health Care, Social Security, Stimulus Spending, Unemployment, Gun Control and/or Abortion. What America saw
The Contract and the Conservatives
In many respects, the changes are already profound. The Contract With America led to much more than a change of parties in the United States, leading instead to fundamental philosophical questions being raised about government in ways not contemplated for 60 years.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-113th-congress-primer-20130102,0,7249240.story?track=rss
Perhaps the best way to address various aspects of the Contract With America, the ideas in and behind the Contract and its relation to the size and scope of government activities, is to answer three basic questions:
- Why was it done?
- How was it done?
- What has become of the Contract and the ideas it embodied?
Despite both the ascendancy of conservatives in the Republican Party and the election of Ronald Reagan as President, it became obvious that only a substantial change in the U.S. Congress could lead to the revolutionary transformation of America sought by conservatives for decades.
Many conservatives who came into Congress in the 1980 election and thereafter shared a much more dynamic vision of the role of conservatives in the Congress than did their predecessors. And among them, Congressman Gingrich consistently articulated his principal goal as the creation of a Republican majority in the House and the adoption of a very wide-ranging reform agenda.
In order to draw the attention of the public to the House of Representatives in the 1994 election, the Contract With America was created. The Contract provided the mechanism to move from vague political rhetoric to creating a specific political program. Through such a program, one could clearly delineate to the general public the contrasting philosophies of government the 1994 election offered the electorate.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/demographics/faiths-of-minorities-in-113th-congress-reflect-diversity-20121203
The Contract's lineage can be traced back to the 1980 election campaign when most of the Republican candidates for federal office similarly stood on the steps of the Capitol in early October of that year and promised to support tax cuts, a strong national defense, and reductions in federal spending. While the Republicans gained 33 seats in the House that year, the Democrats nonetheless maintained their majority, and only the first two of three agenda items were initially adopted; but several years later, even the tax cuts and defense spending increases were abandoned. Federal spending continued out of control throughout the 1980s.
The ideas in the Contract emerged from extensive interaction between the new, more aggressive conservative Congressmen and the emergence of an extensive network of conservative think tanks, such as The Heritage Foundation. In 1980, Heritage and other conservative think tanks initially focused attention on changing the government through a change in the executive branch, as reflected in our monumental study Mandate for Leadership.
But after 1980, the attention of conservatives increasingly focused on the Congress. Heritage, for example, published a study in cooperation with the Claremont Institute in California on The Imperial Congress: Crisis in the Separation of Powers, which was published in 1988. Five years later, a successor study from Heritage came out entitled The Ruling Class: Inside the Imperial Congress; 2.3 million copies of the later volume reached a wide audience. Both volumes drew attention to institutional problems within the Congress that were eventually addressed in the Contract With America.
http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/election.aspx
And finally, Heritage developed a useful handbook, Issues '94, that provided specific legislative and policy recommendations for conservative candidates for Congress; many of these recommendations worked their way into detailed provisions of the Contract With America. In this manner, an extensive philosophical groundwork formed the intellectual foundation for the Contract With America when it formally appeared in the fall of 1994. Sound ideas thus became anchored into concrete policy recommendations.
http://www.newt.org/contract/
How was it done?
The Contract itself emerged publicly with the staging of the mass signing of the Contract on the steps of the U.S. Capitol by 367 candidates for office on September 27, 1994. On that day, all of these candidates publicly pledged: "If we break this Contract, throw us out." The Republicans who were already Members of the House of Representatives organized themselves into 11 working groups that eventually drafted ten bills that made up the Contract.
The items in the Contract were carefully selected in terms of issues that were of fundamental policy importance but also were "doable," that could be accomplished rather quickly because of the broad support they engendered. Extensive public opinion polling revealed that at least 60 percent of Americans supported all ten of the specific items in the Contract. By dealing initially with popular items, such as the Congress being governed by the same rules as all Americans, and broad philosophical concepts, such as balancing the federal budget, the Contract engendered popular momentum that could eventually lead to confronting more contentious issues, such as environmental regulations and Medicare and Medicaid reforms.
Politically, the Contract found a particularly receptive audience in the elections in the fall of 1994 because of a combined disenchantment with the existing Congress and the widespread view of a lack of leadership being provided by President Bill Clinton in the White House. The Clinton campaign in 1992 had generated the expectation of great changes being made to deal with domestic problems. Moreover, the fact that Democrats in 1993 controlled both branches of the Congress together with the White House seemed to create the means for changes to take place by breaking the so-called partisan gridlock in Washington. But the failure to make substantive policy changes in 1993 and 1994 clearly facilitated the political changes in November 1994. Thus, the concept of the Contract found a particularly receptive audience.
What has become of the ideas embodied in the Contract?
One of the revolutionary elements of the Contract is the fact that it actually was implemented as promised. Profound disillusionment within the American political system centered on the perception that politicians make promises only to be elected and then promptly abandon their pledges once safely ensconced in office. Thus, the first and most innovative idea reflected in the Contract required politicians to take their own promises seriously and actually implement them.
The idea of the first 100 days repeated, in a Republican Congress, what had been done by the most successful Democratic President in American history; in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt vigorously launched the New Deal in his first 100 days in office. The key difference between 1994 and 1932 was that Republicans only controlled the Congress while a Democrat, President Clinton, still remained in the White House. This has clearly limited both the speed and scope of changes.
The ten items in the Contract were all acted upon in the first 100 days of the new Congress, which is what the signatories had pledged. Nine of the ten items in the Contract passed the House: Only the constitutional amendment on term limits (which required a two-thirds vote) was defeated. Out of a total of 302 roll call votes on issues related to the Contract With America, the conservatives prevailed on 299 of them. A balanced budget amendment passed in the House by a 300-123 margin but was subsequently defeated as it fell one vote short of the two-thirds needed for passage in the U.S. Senate. The overall margin by which the items in the Contract were passed averaged about 70 percent despite the fact that the Republicans only held a 12-seat margin over the Democrats (52-48 percent, the smallest House majority margin in 40 years). Given the notorious lack of party discipline in the American Congress, the passage by a large majority of nearly all of the items in the Contract was a remarkable achievement.
The ten specific bills which made up the Contract contained numerous provisions addressing a wide range of issues. Other elements of the Contract dealt with fundamental institutional political reforms. Outlined here are a few of these ideas and their status today.
Institutional Reform: Making Congress More Democratic
Most dramatically, the new Congress immediately implemented long-sought reforms within the House of Representatives. In this one area where the new Republican majority had full authority, they effectively exercised it by dramatically changing the nature of the House of Representatives itself during their first day in office; they passed nine major reforms.
First, they made all the laws that applied to the rest of the country apply to Congress itself; this indicated that Congressmen should be treated like other citizens and not remain a privileged elite, often immune from the consequences of the very laws they imposed on the rest of the country.
The House drastically cut by one-third the number of committees and similarly reduced committee staff personnel by one-third. In short, the lesson was that cutting back the size of government should begin in one's own House and thus establish a useful precedent for the rest of the federal government.
The House also provided for an independent audit of the finances of the House itself. This eventually led to a report by Price Waterhouse that found 2,200 instances of double payments for travel expenses, 700 retroactive pay hikes despite a rule against this, and, in general, accounting practices so out-of-date that the auditors could not be sure of the actual numbers they were working with.
Fundamental institutional change also arose in the Citizen Legislature Act provision of the Contract With America, which sought to limit the amount of time a Member of Congress could serve in one body to 12 years. This measure thus sought to limit the role of career politicians in Washington. But the measure required amending the Constitution and failed to achieve the two-thirds constitutional margin necessary. Term limits nonetheless remains a very popular issue, passed by many state legislatures; and Republicans promise that it will be the first item voted on if they retain control of the House after the 1996 elections.
Controlling the Growth of Government: The Fiscal Responsibility Act
A key ingredient, both explicit and implicit, in the Contract is a fundamental change in the character of government in the United States. The very first item in the Contract With America sought "to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses." The key components of this act were a line-item veto and balanced budget/tax limitation amendment. The line-item veto would allow the President to strike specific spending provisions in bills without having to veto the entire bill, and thus eliminate unnecessary spending. This provision passed both the House and Senate in slightly different forms, and President Clinton promises to sign it into law. On the other hand, the balanced budget amendment, which required a two-thirds vote to change the Constitution, was defeated. Even though not succeeding in passing the amendment itself, the House did pass a balanced budget resolution, which in the short term would have the same effect. Thus, the concept of balancing the budget has remained a central theme in the U.S. Congress; the means of achieving this could only come from a drastic reduction in the size and scope of the federal government.
The effort to eliminate unnecessary federal government programs has proven to be one of the biggest challenges facing the new Congress. Initial enthusiasm about eliminating unjustifiable federal programs, such as subsidies to the arts and humanities as well as public television and radio, generated fierce and well-organized opposition by the special-interest groups who benefit from the programs. Thus, instead of immediately eliminating them, the Congress only voted to phase them out over several years. What this means in Washington is that the battle is renewed each year.
The key lesson for anyone wanting to scale back the size of government is that it is best to eliminate a program immediately, as that engenders just as much opposition as reducing funding for a program. Only when a program is totally eliminated is the battle over that program won; in contrast, incremental reduction simply means revisiting the issue every year.
The example of the Reagan Presidency is instructive. Only 12 of 94 programs the Reagan Administration proposed to eliminate actually ended, and 10 of those were in Mr. Reagan's first term. Attempting to simply cut back programs ultimately failed. For example, the Small Business Administration (what we now call a welfare program for very few businesses) was cut back from $2 billion in 1980 to $85 million in 1989, but by the end of the Bush Administration in 1993, the program rose back to $975 million, and it is now once again a target of the new Congress.
Efforts to eliminate entire Cabinet-level departments of the government also have proved difficult. Conservatives have long sought to pursue a policy of "rollback" in dealing with proliferating government departments. The prime candidates on the list of government departments conservatives seek to eliminate are the Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development. But at present, only the Commerce Department seems vulnerable. Another congressional initiative that has sought to consolidate the United States Information Agency, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the Agency for International Development into the State Department prospectively would save $3 billion over the next four years. The combination of disenchantment with the size of the central government and growing budgetary constraints in Congress has created real momentum to seriously reduce the size and scope of central government activities in America.
Welfare Reform: The Personal Responsibility Act
One of the key ingredients in the initial Contract With America has led to one of the most contentious debates in Washington: reforming the welfare state. The Personal Responsibility Act in the Contract included prohibiting welfare going to mothers under the age of 18, halting the increase of benefits for mothers each time they had additional illegitimate children, and cutting welfare spending. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a so-called War on Poverty; but 30 years later, after spending an estimated $5.4 trillion on welfare programs, it seems that poverty is winning the war. Thirty years of central government welfare programs seem only to have worsened the situation. The key problem, as my colleague at The Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, has pointed out, is that "the welfare programs present a 'moral hazard' -- a strong tendency to increase the behaviors which are rewarded by welfare benefits." Specifically, "when welfare benefits are tied, directly or indirectly, to such behaviors as low work effort, divorce, and illegitimacy, welfare strongly promotes an increase in those behaviors." This only creates an ever-escalating cycle of more spending.
The Personal Responsibility Act of the Contract sought to fundamentally revamp the role of the state in welfare policy by developing policies to reduce teenage pregnancies and illegitimate births by prohibiting aid to mothers under 18 who give birth out of wedlock and requiring them to name the fathers of their children, who would be held accountable for their actions. Such women would be required to live at home to receive any aid and would not get housing subsidies to set up their own apartments. The Act also required that aid be cut off if recipients did not work.
The federal government provides 72 percent ($234.3 billion) of all welfare benefits, compared to 28 percent ($90 billion) by the states. This has led the Congress to set certain general standards and criteria that recipients of aid must meet to receive benefits. But beyond some general restrictions, the key reform of welfare consists of attempting to decentralize the program to the 50 states and thereby stimulate numerous creative approaches to dealing with social problems.
This reflected the general conservative philosophical view in the Contract. As Speaker Gingrich writes in his book To Renew America: "We must replace our centralized, micro-managed, Washington-based bureaucracy with a dramatically decentralized system more appropriate to a continent-wide country... 'Closer is better' would be the rule of thumb for our decision making; less power in Washington and more back home, our consistent theme."
Unleashing the American Economy: The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act
This Act attempted to reverse the increasingly debilitating role of the federal government in the American economy. One of its major provisions that has passed both the House and Senate ended so-called unfunded mandates which require states and local communities to impose various regulations but do not provide them the money to carry them out. In this manner, Congress passed allegedly beneficial laws that were cost-free, at least to the federal government. But such laws had enormous destructive power on states, local communities, and businesses. It was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office that such regulations cost state and local government from $8.9 billion to $12.7 billion between 1983 and 1990 and that the costs were growing. Similarly, the federal government often imposed costly regulations on businesses that stifled economic expansion by companies.
The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act included a variety of tax law changes and reforms in federal bureaucratic procedures that would enhance private property rights and economic liberty. Specifically, it provided for a 50 percent capital gains rate cut, allowed small businesses to deduct the first $25,000 worth of investment each year, reduced paperwork burdens on business by at least five percent, and required federal agencies to assess the risks and cost of each new regulation being imposed. Finally, the Contract provided for a Citizens Bill of Rights for anyone subject to investigation or inspection by a federal agency.
Non-statist Approaches to Social Problems: The Family Reinforcement Act
This Act similarly sought to refocus attention on the family and away from the government as the source of solutions to social problems. Thus, the Act reinforced child support orders issued by courts requiring absent fathers to financially support their children and provided both a refundable tax credit of up to $5,000 for families adopting a child and another tax credit of $500 for families caring for a dependent elderly parent or grandparent. Rather than emphasize institutionally provided state care, this Act sought to get orphaned children into homes and encourage family care of relatives. Similarly, another element of the tax provisions of the Contract provided a $500-per-child tax credit, which would mean that a family of four earning $28,000 would have their tax burden cut by one-third.
Other provisions provided incentives for saving money to be used for college education or buying a home and for ending a tax benefit for couples who live together but do not get married. For example, a couple earning $40,000 each will pay only $6,633 each in taxes if filing returns separately; but on a joint return, their combined taxes will rise by $1,285 to $14,541, or about a 10 percent tax penalty for being legally married.
These proposals, as well as others, rested upon a fundamental philosophical principle, as stated in the book version of the Contract With America: "The American family is at the very heart of our society.... After forty years of putting others first [we] will put families first.... It is through the family that we learn values like responsibility, morality, commitment and faith."
Other Items in the Contract
The remaining items in the Contract deal less with the role and nature of the state than with confronting specific legal and security issues. This includes dealing with the growing threat of crime in America, reforming the legal system, and improving the security of the country. They reflect the broad scope of the Contract but go beyond the scope of this lecture.
Conclusion
The ideas espoused in the Contract With America represented the culmination of 30 years of creative conservative thinking dealing with the basic social and economic problems of modern America. The ideas provided the background for the widest range of legislative initiatives, certainly since the 1930s, and possibly at any time in American political history. The fundamental principle involves re-examining the role of the government in society.
Central government attempts to solve many problems have only made them worse; thus, the Contract With America represents specific practical steps that can be taken in a wide range of government activities to roll them back. Ultimately, the government should cease many of its activities; but what is necessary now is a realistic transitional mechanism to achieve that goal. The Contract With America provides precisely the kind of formula that can accomplish that objective.
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The Contract from America
http://www.thecontract.org/support/
The Contract from America was the idea of Houston-based attorney Ryan Hecker. Hecker states that he developed the concept of creating a grassroots call for reform prior to the April 15, 2009 Tax Day Tea Party rallies. To get his idea off the ground, he launched a website which encouraged people to offer possible planks for the contract. Hecker told the New York Times, "Hundreds of thousands of people voted for their favorite principles online to create the Contract as an open-sourced platform for the Tea Party movement. The agenda had the imprint of everyday citizens every step of the way (in the online voting process)." Hecker said the Republicans’ 1994 Contract with America represented the nation’s last intellectual economic conservative movement, but the new list, he said, was “created from the bottom up. It was not crafted in Washington with the help of pollsters."[1]
From the original 1,000 ideas which were submitted, Hecker reduced it to about 50 based on popularity, then to 21 items with the help of former House Republican Leader Dick Armey, whose conservative group FreedomWorks has established close ties with many Tea Party activists around the country.[2][3]
After releasing the 21 ideas at CPAC on February 18, 2010, a final online vote was held to narrow the 21 ideas down to the final 10 to be included in the Contract from America. Over two months, 454,331 votes were cast. The resulting document, including the vote percentages for the statements, was posted online on April 12, 2010.[1]
The Contract lists 10 agenda items that it encourages congressional candidates to follow:[4][5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_from_America
- Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does (82.03%).
- Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control pollution by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of pollutants. (72.20%).
- Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)
- Simplify the tax system: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words – the length of the original Constitution. (64.9%)
- Audit federal government agencies for constitutionality: Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in an audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities. (63.37%)
- Limit annual growth in federal spending: Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%).
- Repeal the health care legislation passed on March 23, 2010: Defund, repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (56.39%).
- Pass an 'All-of-the-Above' Energy Policy: Authorize the exploration of additional energy reserves to reduce American dependence on foreign energy sources and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation. (55.5%).
- Reduce Earmarks: Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%).
- Reduce Taxes: Permanently repeal all recent tax increases, and extend permanently the George W. Bush temporary reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and estate taxes, currently scheduled to end in 2011. (53.38%).
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