Washington. -- Any budget from any president is an X-ray of the government, revealing the skeleton beneath the skin, muscle and fat. President Clinton's budget reveals how simple the government's skeleton is.
Entitlements and interest on the national debt amount to almost two-thirds of the budget. Interest payments are in no sense optional. They are what entitlements were called until quite recently -- "uncontrollables." As applied to entitlement programs, the term "uncontrollables" meant "things the political class would rather not risk controlling."
The other two skeletal components of the government fit cozily into the other one-third of the budget. They are defense and all discretionary domestic spending.
The paralysis of government that the budget documents makes you wonder: Why do the 535 people who are in Washington because they won congressional elections go to all the trouble that winning involves? Some hope to make lifetime careers in Congress. But why? The government, its resources committed, is running out of maneuvering room. What is the fun for people other than conservatives who want to do good, by their lights (turning out lots of government lights), and then be gone?
But are the new conservatives really like that, indifferent to the temptation of careerism? Consider a recent remark by the Fourth Branch of Government, a k a Speaker Gingrich. It packed none of the punch of his forays into cultural anthropology (about men restless to be out and about hunting giraffes, and the like), but in its very blandness the remark was revealing. The speaker said that balancing the budget by the year 2002 will be "hard work."
Tending livestock in Nebraska in February, that is hard work. Being a hod carrier in New Orleans in August is hard work. Teaching in an inner-city high school or giving critical care to the elderly is hard work. But in what sense is it hard work for legislators to decide to spend other people's money at a somewhat slower rate of acceleration than had been planned? That is what balancing the budget in seven years would involve.
It would not be intellectually hard work -- there are many paths to balance. It would involve acrimonious arguments about priorities, but political arguments are presumably not unpleasant to legislators, who were not herded into Washington at bayonet point. However, it would be a daunting task if the aim were to do it without derailing the careerism of people hoping to make Congress a permanent home.
Hence the continuing, indeed the undiminished, salience of the case for term limits. Those who say the churning of Congress in recent elections disproves the need for term limits are misunderstanding the primary reason for limits. The primary reason is not to dislodge entrenched incumbents who use the resources of the modern state as entrenching tools -- although this is, over time, a powerful reason. The primary and sufficient reason for limits is to remove one motive -- careerism -- for entering, and for making decisions while in, Congress.
This reason is obscured by the rhetoric of those advocates of term limits who talk of making Congress "closer to the people." The central reason for term limits is to open between Congress and the people a constitutional distance that would increase the likelihood of deliberation by the legislature concerning the nation's long-term interests.
Term limits would spike the artillery of the big interest groups: They lose their ability convincingly to threaten to end a legislator's career. If, say, the American Association of Retired Persons or the National Rifle Association threatened to work to end a term-limited legislator's career, the legislator could shrug, smile sweetly and say, "Actually the Constitution does that. Perhaps you can do it a few years sooner, but you are powerless to alter my life plans fundamentally."
There currently is a destructive split in the term-limits movement occasioned by the foolishness of those who, for no philosophically serious reason, make a fetish of a three- rather than a six-term limit for members of the House. A six-term limit, symmetrical in years to the generally accepted goal of a two-term limit for senators, would still cause the shrug, the smile and the dismissive words imagined in the paragraph above.
Term limits might so transform Washington's culture of spending, which is created by congressional careerism, that neither a balanced-budget amendment nor a line-item veto would be necessary. And future budgets might be X-rays of a government that could creatively use the talents of 535 public-spirited citizens.
George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.