Senator Jim Risch on Fiscal Policy

Our Founding Fathers created a system of government based upon the separation of powers, ensuring appropriate checks and balances among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. To function properly, our divided government depends on the engagement of every branch. And though the three branches are coequal under the Constitution, the executive branch has always assumed the responsibility for keeping in mind the national interest even if members of Congress are pursuing narrower agendas.

In no area is this more important than government spending. A congressman, left to his own devices, has every incentive to spend as much of the nation’s money as possible on the interests of his own constituents, and to borrow from future generations to keep today’s voters happy. While responsible representatives do their best to check the excesses of others, it is an uphill fight that requires strong support from a White House committed to fiscal discipline.

How has this system of checks and balances been working out under Barack Obama? Unfortunately, not at all.

Over the past three years, our federal government has been spending in an out-of-control fashion. Former Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen is often quoted as having said of the federal budget process that: “a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” But over the last three years, total spending increased from under $3 trillion to nearly $4 trillion. We’re not talking billions any more, but trillions. 

There have been periods in our country’s past, such as World War II, when we were compelled to increase spending to cope with a supreme national emergency. But President Obama has increased spending primarily to feed a stimulus program loaded up with so much pork and so little real, shovel-ready stimulus that it failed to keep unemployment from rising above 10 percent.

This past summer, the debt-ceiling crisis brought the country to a fork in the road. President Obama was presented with a critical choice: either continue the tax-and-spend policies that were exacerbating an already dire economic situation, or chart a new course of fiscal responsibility by reining in runaway government spending.

President Obama read straight from the liberal playbook and called for a “balanced approach”—code for raising taxes. When the idea of higher taxes failed to gain traction at a moment when the economy was hovering on the edge of a double-dip recession, the President abandoned the field. He left it up to Congress to guide the country through the crisis.

Two bad consequences have already followed. First, Standard & Poor’s took the unprecedented step of downgrading our sovereign credit rating. Second, our country’s fiscal future has now been placed in the hands of a “super-committee” of twelve members of Congress, with massive automatic defense cuts threatening any representative daring to question the wisdom of whatever they ultimately propose. This is not the way our system of government is supposed to work.

In dealing with Libya, the administration boasted of President Obama’s strategy of “leading from behind.” The fact is that Libya is not the only instance in which the President has chosen to lead from behind. Leaving it to the super-committee to find $1.2 trillion in savings under the threat of slashing the military budget is not a proper or defensible way to run the American government. Even the President’s own Secretary of Defense has warned that such a cut would be devastating to our national security.

Governing this way is irresponsible, and will certainly not produce the results we need. Breaking our government’s addiction to spending will require leadership from someone who, unlike President Obama, has a genuine commitment to preserving the fiscal health of our nation. It will also require leadership from someone with better ideas than the tried-and-failed liberal nostrums that the President has repeatedly endorsed and employed. In short, it requires leadership from Mitt Romney.

Our system of government works best when the president acts responsibly and on behalf of the interests of our nation as a whole. It is past time to put someone smart and strong and conservative in the White House who will fill the current dangerous empty space.

Jim Risch is a U.S. Senator from Idaho.