Why did the framers of the Constitution grant the House of Representatives the power of the purse

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Power of the purse" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

The power of the purse is the ability of one group to manipulate and control the actions of another group by withholding funding, or putting stipulations on the use of funds. The power of the purse can be used positively (e.g. awarding extra funding to programs that reach certain benchmarks) or negatively (e.g. removing funding for a department or program, effectively eliminating it). The power of the purse is most often utilized by forces within a government that do not have direct executive power, but have control over budgets and taxation.

In colonial Canada, the fight for "responsible government" in the 1840s centered on question of whether elected parliaments or appointed governors would have control over the purse strings, mirroring earlier fights between Parliament and the Crown in Britain.

After confederation, the phrase "power of the purse" took on a particular meaning. It now primarily refers to the federal government's superior tax-raising abilities compared to the provinces, and the consequent ability of the federal government to compel provincial governments to adopt certain policies in exchange for transfer payments. Most famously, the Canada Health Act sets rules that provinces must follow to receive health transfers (the largest of all such transfers). Opponents of this arrangement refer to this situation as the "fiscal imbalance", while others argue for the federal government's role in setting minimum standards for social programs in Canada.

The power of the purse's earliest examples in a modern sense occurred in the English Parliament, which gained the exclusive power to authorise taxes and thus could control the nation's cash flow. Through this power, Parliament slowly subverted the executive strength of the crown; King Charles II was limited in his powers to engage in various war efforts by a refusal by Parliament to authorise further taxes and by his inability to secure loans from foreign nations, making him much less powerful.

In recent years as a result of devolution, funding for devolved issues to the Scottish Parliament as well as the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies has been determined through the Barnett Formula. This formula determines the overall budget of the devolved parliaments for devolved issues proportionally relative to spending on those issues in England. As a result, while responsibility for funding of devolved matters rests with the devolved bodies themselves, they in effect must enact policies of a broadly similar cost to those decided by the UK parliament for England and maintain that broad proportionality in order to ensure the long-term financial viability of such policies.

In the federal government of the United States, the power of the purse is vested in the Congress as laid down in the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 (the Appropriations Clause) and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 (the Taxing and Spending Clause).

The power of the purse plays a critical role in the relationship of the United States Congress and the President of the United States, and has been the main historic tool by which Congress has limited executive power. One of the most prominent examples is the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which eliminated all military funding for the government of South Vietnam and thereby ended the Vietnam War. Other recent examples include limitations on military funding placed on Ronald Reagan by Congress, which led to the withdrawal of United States Marines from Lebanon.

The power of the purse in military affairs was famously subverted during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.[1] Congress denied further aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. Unwilling to accept the will of Congress, members of the Reagan administration solicited private donations, set up elaborate corporate schemes and brokered illegal arms deals with Iran in order to generate unofficial funds that could not be regulated by Congress.

More recently, budget limitations and using the power of the purse formed a controversial part of discussion regarding Congressional opposition to the Iraq War. On March 23, 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a supplemental war budget that imposed a timeline on the presence of American combat troops in Iraq, but the legislation was not passed.

The power of the purse has also been used to compel the U.S. states to pass laws, in cases where Congress does not have the desire or constitutional power to make it a federal matter. The most well-known example of this is regarding the drinking age, where Congress passed a law to withhold 10% of federal funds for highways in any state that did not raise the age to 21. The law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the South Dakota v. Dole case. Congress was not allowed to change the drinking age directly because the 21st Amendment (which ended Prohibition in the U.S.) gave control of alcohol to the states. In 2009, Congress considered similar legislation regarding texting while driving.

This power was curtailed somewhat in a case regarding the Affordable Care Act, in which the Supreme Court ruled in June 2012 that the law's withholding of all existing Medicaid funding for states that failed or refused to expand their Medicaid programs to cover the uninsured poor was "unduly coercive", despite the fact that the federal government would pay the entirety of the states' expansion for the first years, and 90% thereafter. It was left unclear what percentage would be considered acceptable.

Other uses

In the US House or Senate, the chairperson of a legislative committee may refuse to give funding to a senator or other delegate or representative, or deny his or her appropriations bill or amendment a vote, because he or she refused to support a bill which the chairperson wanted (a tit-for-tat retaliation). While typically applied to "pork barrel" spending for special interests, it may also block funding for genuine needs of a constituency or the general public.

The administration or student government at a college or university may revoke some or even all funding for a student newspaper or student radio station, because it has printed or aired an editorial or a news article or segment critical of it. This is also an example of censorship.

Loss of supply
Purse
Taxing and Spending Clause
Tax choice
Appropriation bill

^ Barrett Seaman; Alessandra Stanley (Jul 9, 1984). "Cutting Off Nicaragua's Contras". TIME. Archived from the original on August 20, 2009. Retrieved 2011-03-03.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Power_of_the_purse&oldid=1108624996"

January 27, 2011 3 min read Download Report

Legislative checks and balances is one of the key inventions that convinced Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 9 that the cause of liberty was not lost, in spite of the failure of previous republics throughout the ages. According to the Framers, powers ought not only to be distributed between the three branches of government (separation of powers), but Congress, as the most powerful branch, should be divided into two, with different constituencies, term lengths, sizes, and functions for each house. In this spirit, the Constitution allocates the power to raise revenue—part of the power of the purse—to the House of Representatives, the legislative body closest to the people. Regrettably, this clause has had little effect in practice as the Senate has construed its power to amend so broadly as to replace the entire text of revenue bills that had originated in the House. Members of the House of Representatives should be more zealous in protecting this exclusive prerogative. This essay is adapted from The Heritage Guide to the Constitution for a new series providing constitutional guidance for lawmakers.

“All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.”

— Article I, Section 7, Clause 1

Consistent with the English requirement that money bills must commence in the House of Commons, the Framers expected that the Origination Clause would ensure that “power over the purse” would lie with the legislative body closer to the people. Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government could not tax individuals, and the clause was one of several provisions meant to cabin the national revenue power created under the Constitution. The clause was also part of a critical compromise between large and small states, helping to temper the large states’ unhappiness with equal representation in the Senate by leaving the power to initiate tax bills with the House of Representatives, where the large states had greater influence.

The final version of the clause was much weaker than the form proposed by Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, which would have required all “money bills” (including appropriations) to originate in the House and would have given the Senate no power to amend. Gerry feared that the Senate would become an aristocratic body because of its small size, its selection by legislatures rather than by election, and its six-year term of office. “It was a maxim,” he said, “that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.”

The strongest proponents of national power opposed the clause in any form. As James Wilson of Pennsylvania explained at the Convention, “If both branches were to say yes or no, it was of little consequence which should say yes or no first.” What survived the contentious debates was closer to Wilson’s vision than to Gerry’s. The clause was restricted to bills for raising revenue, and the Senate was given the amendment power (which, Gerry thought, gutted the provision of any real effect).

Even in weakened form, however, the Origination Clause was not meaningless. James Madison, no supporter of the clause at the Convention, gave it a generous interpretation in The Federalist No. 58: “The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of the government....This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect, every just and salutary measure.”

As it turned out, the Origination Clause has had little effect. For one thing, many revenue bills have their intellectual genesis in the Treasury Department, not in Congress. Furthermore, Elbridge Gerry’s fears were well founded: the Senate’s power to amend is generally understood in practice to be so broad that the Senate can replace the entire text of a bill that technically originates in the House.

The understanding that the clause is a nullity reflects practice, however, not doctrine. In its most recent Origination Clause case, United States v. Munoz-Flores (1990), a divided Supreme Court rejected the argument that origination issues are nonjusticiable political questions. The Court held that a plaintiff with standing may pursue a claim that a revenue statute improperly originated in the Senate. In Munoz-Flores, however, the Court did not reach the larger issues, concluding that a bill to impose a user’s fee, where raising revenue was a secondary concern, was not a “bill for raising revenue.” The larger issues await another case where a taxpayer subject to an unquestioned revenue statute can raise serious questions about the statute’s origin.

Erik M. Jensen is the David L. Brennan Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University.