No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013


The No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013 is a law passed during the 113th United States Congress. The Act temporarily suspended the US debt ceiling from February 4 to May 18, 2013. It also placed temporary restrictions on Congressional salaries.

Background

An earlier version of the No Budget, No Pay Act was originally introduced in early 2012 by Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee. It stipulated that congressmen in the United States Congress would not get paid unless they passed a budget by October 1, 2012.
The bill received limited bipartisan support. However, some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle opposed the bill, stating it would have likely violated the 27th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened."
It was considered dead until mid-January 2013 when Republican lawmakers came up with the idea of combining sections of this bill with a debt ceiling increase; Democratic lawmakers eventually accepted the compromise.

Provisions/Elements of the bill

This summary is based largely on the summary provided by the Congressional Research Service, a public domain source.
This summary was written by the bill's sponsor, Rep. Dave Camp.
The Senate passed the FY2014 budget on March 23, 2013, 23 days before the deadline set by the No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013. This was the first Senate budget passage since a FY2010 budget passed on April 29, 2009.

Congressional Budget Office report

H.R. 325 would temporarily suspend the debt limit by the Treasury until May 18, 2013. On the following day, the current debt limit of $16.394 trillion would be raised by the amount of borrowing above that level during the period in which the limitation was suspended.
The Act also provided an incentive for action on a concurrent resolution on the budget. If a version of such a resolution has not been passed by a House of the Congress by April 15, 2013, the salaries of Members of that chamber would be put in an escrow account. The escrow account for a given House would remain in place until a concurrent resolution on the budget was passed for fiscal year 2014 by that chamber, or until the last day of the 113th Congress, whichever was earlier.

Procedural history

House

The Act was introduced into the House of Representatives by Rep. Dave Camp on January 21, 2013. The bill was referred to the Committee on House Administration and the House Committee on Ways and Means. The House voted to pass the bill on January 23, 2013, by 285-144 in .

Senate

The Act was received in the Senate on January 24, 2013. It passed the Senate on January 31, 2013 by a vote of 64-34 in .

Presidential signature

President Barack Obama signed the Act into law on February 4, 2013.

Debate and discussion

Constitutionality

The act implicates constitutional concerns, because the Twenty-seventh Amendment provides that Congress may not "vary" the compensation of senators and representatives until there has been an intervening election. The act would withhold the pay of legislators only temporarily, rather than permanently; commentators differ on whether this is permissible under the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The Supreme Court has never addressed the issue.