[moocowduckquack]

You could have a law that disallows the entire civil federal budget being held to ransom, such as declaring that the final date for a funding vote for an established government service must come at least 3 months ahead or else the service is automatically assigned funds. That way, all the sections of the budget that are not under contention would have been assigned funding 3 months ago and the worst that could be done would be a delay on sections of government business, not the shutting down of random stuff like parks.

[bmelton]

There are currently laws that require the executive branch to submit a budget every year (the Budget Control Act of 1921), which the president violated for a few years consecutively, forcing the past few years' continuing resolutions (and in part, the sequester).

There are additional Budget Acts (passed in the mid-70s, 90s, etc.) that require those budgets to be acted upon by Congress or reconsidered, which have all been routinely violated for the past few years as well.

The issue with these bills is that they are only enforced by those with the power to break them, which means that they are de facto never enforced.

[ewoodrich]

Here is a portion of the summary of the President's 2013 budget proposal. [1]

I don't know where you get the idea that the President is violating the Budget Control Act. The issue is that the Senate and the House refuse to conference, due to the remote possibility of an actual revised budget being passed. Therefore CRs are used to maintain funding without dealing with the seemingly intractable partisan disputes in the current split Congress.

(and the Budget Control Act of 2011 was attempt to move this debate from the full floor to the Supercommittee, which promptly failed and resulted in the sequester) I'm not sure how that's relevant. [2]

[1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress_Joint_Se...

[bmelton]

When I spoke of the president's violations of the Budget Act, I wasn't referring to them in the present tense. Regardless, his violations have been numerous, though you are correct that he is not currently in violation of the budget act.