It’s The Congress, Stupid.

Written and copyrighted by: John H Ramsey, Founder, The  Project

FEBRUARY 23, 2025

The title to this article is an homage to the Bayou Bravado of James Carville, who coined the phrase IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID 33 years ago to focus his colleagues and the rest of us on the real problems in our country and the winning strategy to elect Bill Clinton President in 1992.

We should all learn from that. Get the problem right and you improve the chances of solving it. The real problem nowadays is our Congress and only We The People can reform it.

When they built our great Constitution our founding fathers gave us a playbook that is still going strong two and a half centuries later. But they didn’t finish the job. They didn’t establish rules requiring Congress to properly process and safeguard all the money we send to Washington every year.

Maybe the founders would fix it later, after they had gotten the basics done. But they didn’t. Maybe future generations of leaders would do it. But they haven’t.

When the Constitution was ratified our federal budget was $4 million. Today We The People and our businesses send about $5 trillion to the federal government every year. That’s over one million times larger, and still there are no rules in our Constitution about what Congress may, must, or cannot do with it. None. Our Constitution remains silent. No instructions or safeguards from the people to our Congress to require wise financial policy.

Can you imagine any organization, public or private, that could grow by one million times and not change the basic operating rules governing the conduct of their affairs?

And it shows. It is much more than our debts and deficits. According to TruthInAccounting.org our federal government will transfer to our grandchildren approximately $160 trillion of unfunded future financial liabilities and nothing is being done about it.

Instead of our leaders’ proposing amendments to our Constitution to “scale up”, to better manage so much more of our money, the behavior of Congress deteriorates, the Constitution stays the same, abuses continue, problems get worse.

DOGE WILL HELP AND DESERVES OUR SUPPORT

To help fix the symptoms of our fiscal mess, we have DOGE. We need DOGE big time. DOGE in every nook and cranny of our massive federal government. And rather than disbanding DOGE in mid-2026 we should keep it going as long as it produces tangible, measurable results. Lord knows there is plenty for them to do.

But let’s be honest. We also like DOGE because we know the problem needs solving and we have someone else to do it. We think we don’t have to get involved.

But in truth we need more. We need DOGE PLUS. The “plus” is us – We The People.

CONGRESS DOES NOT WORK WELL BUT PROTECTS ITS PREROGATIVES

Congress basically has three things to do:

• Formulate new policies for the US federal government and enact them into law;
• Appropriate money and tax our people to fund government operations;
• Oversee the operations of the three federal government branches to ensure that they operate efficiently and effectively and properly within the law;

It doesn’t do any of those three things well, or on time. The extent and scope of partisan bickering and political warfare has reached paralyzing effect and virtually guarantees that attempts to create effective political coalition-building and compromise are mostly doomed to failure.

Such devices as continuing resolutions, budget reconciliations, and other work-arounds are the go-to mechanisms substituting for regular order. Congress is doing the minimum necessary to permit government to limp along.

Examples abound…

• According to the Congressional Research Service (Document # R48176, January 16, 2025) “Since (October 1, 1976, the beginning of) FY1977, there have been (only) four times (in 48 years) when all (twelve) regular appropriations bills have been enacted before the start of the fiscal year.
• According to their official schedule (https://www.house.gov/legislative-activity) The U.S. House of Representatives is in session for only 11 days in February, 2025 with an additional 7 days listed as district work periods (the Congressional equivalent of work from home). Another eight days, two days per week, are travel days, officially or unofficially. And eight days are for weekends.

Dr. Yuval Levin, since January 1, 2025 Duke University’s sixth Egan Visiting Professor and an expert in the functioning of our federal government writes, “I think…our system can only work if it has Congress at its center, if the big decisions are made by the representative branch of our government,” he said. “The presidency is not it.”

In his June 11, 2024 article in The Atlantic entitled What’s Wrong with Congress (and How to Fix It) Dr. Levin writes, “Congress is terribly unpopular, and no one who watches it closely is satisfied with how it is working. Our national legislature barely manages to do its most basic work (such as funding the government), let alone take on complex national challenges (such as modernizing immigration policy). Congress’s regular order—the committee work, oversight, and routine policy negotiations that ought to be the bread and butter of a legislature—has become deformed nearly out of existence. When bills do advance, it is typically by going around these structured processes, either through the work of ad hoc “gangs” of members of both parties or through leadership fiats that deny most legislators any meaningful role. What members end up doing instead too often looks more like political performance art than traditional legislative work, and only exacerbates the partisan frenzy of our civic life.

Yet there is not widespread agreement about just what the underlying problem actually is, and therefore what solutions should look like. If Congress is dysfunctional, what function is it failing to perform?”

Instead of improving its ability to function, Members of Congress concerned about DOGE are expressing their outrage by attacking President Trump and Elon Musk, not about any particular DOGE recommendations, or even the need for DOGE at all, but about whether the activities of DOGE threaten the authority of Congress and its committees. For example, no sooner was DOGE announced than California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren rushed to the microphones to remind us that it was the Congress who had the authority to change the operation of executive branch agencies, not DOGE.

So what does history suggest will happen to the myriad opportunities for cost reduction and efficiency improvement that a well-run DOGE will produce? Let’s look at our recent history.

EFFORTS OVER THE LAST HALF CENTURY TO SOLVE THE FEDERAL FISCAL MESS HAVE FAILED AND CONTINUE TO FAIL

Members within unwilling Congresses have tried in the past to fix our dangerous federal government fiscal mess with new laws to impose fiscal discipline on themselves. New laws don’t help because Congress ignores those laws after passing them when compliance is inconvenient, and instead does expedient, self-serving things, often creating a patchwork of short-term fixes when problems loom, while jealously guarding, but failing to responsibly wield, its powers of the purse. Unfortunately, our federal courts have so far been unwilling or unsuccessful in calling Congress to account.

Some Members of Congress regularly propose Constitutional Amendments to balance the federal budget and control spending, only to see them get shelved and ignored.

Emphasis in recent years has been for Congress to delegate the responsibility for solutions to celebrity experts, by forming something special like a Blue Ribbon Commission. The history of those special commissions is not good (see my article entitled WHY I OPPOSE THE PROPOSED FEDERAL FISCAL COMMISSION AND WHY YOU SHOULD TOO. Find it here: https://bofrusa.com). I hope DOGE does not suffer the same outcome as previous well-meaning attempts.

Article V of our Constitution permits State legislatures to call an Article V Convention of The States (AVC) to propose amendments without the permission or the participation of Congress. This was designed to serve as a vehicle for citizens and the sovereign States to directly express controls over the federal government.

Efforts to call an AVC have been actively pursued by dedicated citizens groups for over 50 years and continue to the present day, so far without success. Twice since 1979 the requisite number of States applied to call an AVC but Congress failed to call it, in violation of their Article V responsibilities. No court challenges followed.

Only recently a resolution has been introduced and is pending in both houses of Congress and in federal courts to mandate that Congress accept those applications and call an AVC.

Meanwhile, the independence of States to assert AVC controls on Congress has been severely compromised because now roughly 35% of State budgets are financed by the federal government. Under these circumstances if States impose Constitutional fiscal controls on the federal government, Congress might retaliate by reducing of some or all of this federal funding to the States, thus requiring States to make difficult political decisions about replacing it.

CITIZENS NEED TO SOLVE OUR BIG PROBLEMS BUT ARE NOT DOING IT

From our beginning, our leaders have been telling us that there would be other issues after our Revolution requiring the American People to be all in again, issues so crucially important to our nation’s continued progress or existence that they must not be left to elected or appointed officials to do as they please or think best, or think best serve them. There are some issues about which We The People have to speak up and tell our elected and appointed representatives what we want them to do, hold them strictly to account, promote them to higher office when they succeed, and terminate their services when they do not.

As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 concluded Ben Franklin told an inquiring citizen that ours was to be a Republic “if you can keep it”, a warning there would be times when We The People would have to step up and get involved again.

So later did Abraham Lincoln when he warned us that “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Our Federal Government’s finances are a dangerous mess and nothing of substance has been done about it. The main reason is that We The People are a long way from all in on required reforms.

Frustrated American citizens in recent history increasingly dislike and distrust The Congress but continue to be ineffective stewards of their votes, on the one hand advocating actions to “throw the bums out” while returning, in 2000 for example, 98% of incumbents to another term in office. Numerous studies have reinforced citizens’ contempt for the institutions of Congress while steadfastly supporting their own representatives.

THE WAY FORWARD FOR WE THE PEOPLE – DOGE PLUS

We need rules, Constitutional rules, requiring Congress to better manage our money, rules they must follow because they are clearly expressed in the Constitution, rules established by the will and the vote of We The People.

Thomas Jefferson knew this and urged we do it when he wrote, “In questions of power…let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Years later so did Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter when he reminded us that, “The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.” Said another way, absent procedural safeguards, absent liberty.

We need to amend our U.S. Constitution to include strong enforceable fiscal rules, requirements, and process controls, with consequences for non-compliance, so that Congress will be required to do what it should have been doing all along.

The best version of needed reforms is a package of five Constitutional amendments, already drafted and ready to go, entitled The , BOFR for short, that will require adherence to specific Constitutional instructions, with penalties for non-compliance, in Taxation, Spending, Regulations, Social Security and Medicare, Accounting and Independent Auditing. It is four pages long in total. Here is the text: https://bofrusa.com/bill-of-financial-responsibilities/

To get our people in this fight, we need two things…

• a Fiscal Commission of We The People charged with reviewing the BOFR, and hopefully endorsing it and proposing this package of specific solutions to the States and to the Congress for ratification to bring our nation back from too many years of fiscal malpractice, while we still can.
• a nationwide, sustained education and messaging campaign, starting immediately, to persuade all American citizens that we must be all in on this, We The People’s solution, and insist that our elected representatives get it done. This messaging campaign must make it clear that if We The People do not succeed in ratifying BOFR or similar versions of these amendments we will suffer serious, painful, and costly fiscal consequences to our country, possibly for a long time in the future, perhaps even permanently;

While DOGE continues its noble work to root out waste, fraud, and abuse and decades of process neglect, saving our country untold $billions possibly $trillions, it will also keep us supplied with new, fresh lists of reasons why the permanent solution Mr. Jefferson first advocated, binding Congress by the “chains of the Constitution” will at long last be the national solution whose time has come.