The idea was that democracy needed an alarm clock.
Outdated laws were piling up. Bad ones weren’t being fixed. So lawmakers turned to “sunset clauses” — expiration dates forcing Congress to reconsider old laws before they disappeared.
What going over the 'fiscal cliff' would mean . . .
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Full text of President Obama’s speech on national security
“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
Instead, Washington’s current crisis reveals that the sunset clause has become something unintended: democracy’s snooze button.
The current Congress has already pushed back at least a dozen laws’ expiration dates, often with minimal debate. Now, lawmakers are also scrambling to decide whether to delay various tax measures as part of the broader debate over the “fiscal cliff.”
It marks a sad end for an earnest good-government idea. As Congress spends its time extending sunsets, a tool meant to stop procrastination is now used to make procrastination look like work.
“The trouble with sunset clauses is usually they’re not enforced, because Congress is either too busy — or, more accurately — too neglectful,” said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). He said he still believes in the theory: A “sunset clause is a very appropriate remedy. But it’s got to be enforced to mean anything.”
The fiscal cliff crisis was triggered by a broad set of deadlines, all falling together at year’s end. Most are the results of Congress trying — and failing — to scare itself into action.
The huge looming budget cuts, for instance, were the punishment lawmakers set to make themselves slash the budget before now. They didn’t.
But crisis also involves a set of sunsetting tax laws, which Congress now wants to extend before they disappear for good.
One expired measure keeps something called the alternative minimum tax from hitting a broader swath of middle-class families. Lawmakers have been pushing back the expiration of this “patch” since 2001. Time is up again.
Also expiring is a package of miscellaneous tax breaks called “tax extenders.” The total package could be more than $100 billion.
But the biggest items on the list are tax cuts approved under President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003. These originally carried a sunset date in 2010. That provision was added so the cuts could pass with a simple majority while also calming many lawmakers worried about the deficit.
“This bill contains sunset provisions’ — critical to my decision to support this legislation — which will allow us to revisit the components of this bill in the future,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told her colleagues back in 2001. She voted yes.
Feinstein did not respond to requests for an interview on the issue last week.
When 2010 came, Congress pushed back the sunset for the tax cuts to 2012. Now, it seems certain that the vast majority of the cuts will be extended again. The fight between President Obama and House Republicans is over whether to allow some to expire for the highest earners, or about 2 percent of all federal taxpayers.
Obama, in essence, wants a tiny sunset. Republicans want none at all.
“You can’t do it right” if you use sunset clauses this way, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. The clauses have served to hold Congress’s feet to the fire, he said, but the deadline is too tight.
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