(5 of 5)
First, though, there remains the possibility that the judiciary will save Congress from itself. "There is no way this thing can be made constitutional," says Alan Morrison, the attorney handling the suit to stop Gramm-Rudman. "It's diseased." But when the case was argued before the Federal Court of Appeals in Washington on Jan. 10, Judge Antonin Scalia outspokenly challenged Morris' view that Congress could not delegate its funding authority. "Congress often delegates to the Executive difficult questions that it would rather not grapple with," Judge Scalia said. "I don't see how you can say that Congress hasn't made the tough judgment. They've made a judgment to balance the budget."
Though a rigid application of that law would indeed threaten to put the Government out of business in a lot of ways, there are perfectly sensible people in Washington who see the act as primarily a way of making all branches of Government rethink what the Government does and what it is willing to pay for. "We need a reordering of the relationship between the Federal Government and the people," says Gramm, and that is a view that many can endorse.
Looking back over the long accumulation of deficits, which stretches back to the last balanced budget in 1969, Florida's Democratic Senator Lawton Chiles acknowledges that "we always seem to come up with a new slogan to patch over gaps in our willpower." And looking ahead to the dangers that Gramm-Rudman may bring, Wisconsin's Republican Senator Rudy Boschwitz says, "It is perhaps a little mindless, but it may be the only way out of the morass." All of which is another way of asking, If Gramm-Rudman is too arbitrary, what is going to get the Government off the road to bankruptcy? Oysters, anyone?
FOOTNOTE: *Republican Freshmen Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire actually have a better-known co-sponsor, Democrat Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, but two sponsors' names are generally about all that people want to remember. Purists call it Gramm-Rudman- Hollings, or GRH. Officially, its name is the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985.