Cox Proposes Budget Reform Package : Congress: He offers a new GOP plan as the House votes to base legislation on estimates of congressional agency, not OMB. That will increase outlays for Democratic social programs, Republicans claim.

As last year’s battle of the budget erupted anew in Congress Thursday, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), surrounded by House Republican leaders, unveiled a long-shot budget-reform package designed to prevent future fiscal debacles.

“The (federal) budget right now is complex, it’s mystifying, people don’t understand it, and they don’t like the result,” Cox told reporters at a Capitol press conference.

The bill, which technically would amend the Budget Act of 1974, would seek to simplify and bring more order to the federal budget process.

The measure would bar Congress from passing any spending legislation until both the House and Senate approved a legally binding joint budget resolution and reduced the number of broad budget categories which Congress must deal with to 19.

It also would eliminate “baseline” budgeting, which keys spending increases to the previous year’s spending level and the rate of inflation, and requires a two-thirds vote to exceed the mandatory spending ceilings set by Congress in its annual budget resolution.

“This budget process reform bill, frankly, does not address whether we should have a tax increase or not,” Cox said. “It does not address whether we should have a spending increase or not. It says we should do these things in the light of day and we ought to do them in an orderly fashion.”

In the House, which gathered Thursday for the first meeting of the 102nd Congress, Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats by a 167-267 margin. Even so, Cox and other Republicans said they believe that the budget reform bill has a chance to pass this year.

Cox predicted that if the bill makes progress, it would move first in the Senate, where it could be more easily attached to unrelated, “must-pass” legislation. In the House, the Cox bill has been assigned to four separate committees, each of which must hold hearings if the bill is to reach the House floor.

“We don’t need all the Democrats, we don’t even need all the Republicans,” Cox said. “But we need to get half of the Congress on board with the notion that it is responsible to have a budget first . . . to tie our individual spending decisions to.”

As he spoke, Cox was flanked by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands), chairman of the House Republican Conference, the party caucus.

In supporting the Cox legislation, Lewis said, “it is important that we go back to the fundamentals, to try to reorganize the process so we can make some sense out of the budget rather than allowing the (Democratic) leadership to control the process by their actions at the last minute.”

Gingrich added: “What Chris Cox’s proposed reforms do is create a framework in which you guarantee that the process is larger than the promises. . . . It is remarkably well-thought through.”

Moments earlier, Gingrich, Lewis and House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) accused House Democrats of breaking a pledge that they had made during negotiations on the complex budget accord enacted last fall.

“We’re very much upset over the fact that the Democratic Party has chosen to, frankly, go back on their word,” Michel told reporters. “I don’t think you can put it in any other . . . terms.”

Michel and the other Republicans opened fire as the House adopted rules that, in effect, give Congress, instead of the White House, the immediate power to police the spending limits enacted as part of last fall’s compromise deficit-reduction package.

Democratic leaders defended the new rules as necessary to implement the 1990 budget accord and to circumvent what one congressman characterized as White House attempts to block expansion of major social programs by providing unrealistically high cost estimates.

Although the issue appears arcane on the surface, the rules fight foreshadows continuing partisan hostility over budget issues that many thought had been laid to rest with the adoption last Oct. 27 of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990.

The budget bill, designed to reduce the projected federal deficit by more than $40 billion this year and nearly $500 billion over five years, raised taxes on income, cigarettes, alcohol and other items and set limits on the growth of future federal spending.

The bill’s enforcement provisions require that any increases in spending caused by expansion of entitlement programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, must be offset by automatic cuts in other programs.

The budget bill authorizes the Office of Management and Budget, which reports to the White House, to determine the impact on the budget of new entitlement legislation.