Senator Byrd Shepherds a Bill

Abstract

Senator Byrd Shepherds a Bill Katherine A. Scott In 1974 the fifty-six-year-old senior senator from West Virginia prepared to shepherd through the Senate a bill to overhaul the congressional budget process—a project that would have long-term consequences, both for the nation and for his political future. It was a massive undertaking, and one that would require careful attention to detail and much patience. It was a challenge—that is to say, it was custom-made for Senator Robert C. Byrd. Through the late winter and early spring of 1974, as the battle among the three branches of government reached a climax in the Watergate scandal, Byrd quietly tended to the less dramatic but equally consequential work of reforming the federal budget process. He devoted months of time and energy to crafting a bipartisan solution to a problem that had plagued the legislative branch for six decades—the federal budget. Throughout the twentieth century, Congress had struggled to develop a mechanism to fund—effectively and efficiently—the exponential growth of the federal government. "I would venture to say there is no more complex, no more important legislation before this session of the Congress than [this] subject matter," Byrd remarked at a Senate hearing on January 15, 1974.1 Byrd's bill, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, signed into law by President Richard Nixon on July 12, 1974, would help Congress to regain its position as a coequal branch of government. When Byrd embarked on this journey in late 1973, he may not have been confident that his efforts would succeed. The Senate had lost two recent battles with the executive branch over national budgets and federal spending. The first confrontation with the president came with Congress's growing opposition to America's continued involvement in the war in Vietnam. Then, as senators reluctantly acquiesced to the administration's request to raise the debt ceiling—the third such request in a calendar year—they also battled the president over his impoundment of funds. By 1974 Senator Byrd and a growing number of his colleagues had become increasingly alarmed by [End Page 37] Congress's inability to shape and implement policy through its constitutional power of the purse. Ending the War in Vietnam The first battle in this war of the budget erupted shortly after Richard Nixon became president. Though Nixon had campaigned on a pledge to end the war in Vietnam, it wasn't long before senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee received disturbing news. A classified Senate investigation found that while the administration was drawing down troops in Vietnam, it was expanding the war into neighboring countries—without consulting members of Congress. These developments forced some senators to take a fateful step to confront the administration. On September 16, 1969, Senator John Sherman Cooper, a moderate Kentucky Republican, offered an amendment to a military procurement authorization bill to restrict military funding the following year. "I want it clearly understood," Cooper explained when introducing his proposal, that my purpose "is to prohibit . . . the use of any funds appropriated by the Congress . . . to the Armed Forces . . . for sending our [military] into war, armed conflict, combat . . . in Laos and Thailand."2 Cooper aimed to prohibit the war's expansion by halting the flow of congressionally approved funds. He hoped his plan would force the administration to withdraw troops from the region.3 The Senate unanimously approved Cooper's amendment, 86–0, on September 17, 1969, but in conference House negotiators stripped that language from the bill. Undeterred, Cooper tried to amend another defense authorization bill a few weeks later. Joined by colleague Frank Church, a liberal Democrat from Idaho, the Cooper-Church amendment sought to limit the use of congressionally approved funds to "finance the introduction of American ground troops into Laos or Thailand."4 This amendment became law on December 29, 1969. Four months later, President Nixon announced that he had sent US ground troops into neighboring Cambodia without advising Congress. Frustrated and irate, senators denounced the action. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, a Democrat from Arkansas, was characteristically blunt: "The Executive is conducting a constitutionally unauthorized Presidential war...