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Constitution?
What Constitution?
Yes,
Virginia does have a state constitution, though you
wouldn't know it from the actions of the General
Assembly.
May
is the month for speeches and essays about the
importance of the rule of law. Every year at this
time we are reminded that free societies cannot be
preserved without the protection of a constitution
and the independence of judges.
I’d
feel better about the annual Law Day pronouncements
about how vital the rule of law is if we were
actually obeying our own state constitution.
Instead, most of us treat it as a museum piece. That
includes our elected officials, who have taken an
oath to uphold it.
Case
in point: The much-discussed car tax relief statute,
which was originally enacted in 1998, provides for
annual payments from the state treasury to local
treasurers to offset local governments’ loss of
personal property tax revenues mandated by that
statute. This automatic and perpetual state spending
offends a provision of the state constitution: “No
money shall be paid out of the State treasury except
in pursuance of appropriations made by law; and no
such appropriation shall be made which is payable
more than two years and six months after the end of
the session of the General Assembly at which the law
is enacted authorizing the same.”
A
similar constitutional defect can be found in the
statute providing for the disposition of state sales
and use tax revenues, which automatically and
perpetually appropriates sales and use tax revenues
from the state treasury to local governments. The
food tax statute suffers from that same flaw.
The
reason all of this matters is that the people of
Virginia and their elected representatives are
losing control of the state budget. These statutes
are intended to lock the budget process on automatic
pilot in direct violation of the state constitution.
Virginia’s
budget process is beginning to resemble the
congressional budget process. We should resist this
trend for policy reasons as well as on
constitutional grounds.
Legislators
should be forced to make tough calls about how to
spend our tax dollars every two years without the
restraining effect of statutory schemes that attempt
to bind legislators well into the future on how
state revenues are to be spent. In Washington,
Congress has been so limited by long-term statutory
restrictions and mandates on federal spending that
very little “discretionary” spending remains.
There
are some elected officials who prefer to have their
hands tied. They don’t want to make the tough
budget decisions that are required when the General
Assembly effectively starts from scratch on the
budget every two years.
As
I’ve written in this space previously, the only
spending obligations the General Assembly can’t
ignore or alter are payments on state debt,
transfers to the Rainy Day Fund, funding of the
state retirement system and all constitutionally
established offices, and satisfaction of existing
state contract commitments.
The
General Assembly isn’t bound by any other
commitments when it puts together a biennial budget.
We
will never get control of state spending if we
don’t insist on compliance with the
constitution’s requirement that no money can be
spent without an appropriation and that
appropriations are limited to approximately two
years.
The
recent special session concluded its business with
little or no regard for the constitution, with its
use of budget riders and perpetual restrictions on
future appropriations. It really shouldn’t matter
to the people whether this was the result of neglect
or arrogance. The General Assembly has tightened
several more straps of a fiscal straightjacket.
--
May 24, 2004
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