According to the General Accounting Office, excessive overpayments, erratic bookkeeping, and chronic financial mismanagement at the 12 largest federal agencies cost taxpayers $23 billion in 2001 – which amounts to $250 for every person who pays taxes. The total amount of taxpayer losses was probably much greater, however, because most agencies were not required to conduct internal budget reviews or provide any financial information to the GAO.

That changed last year when Congress passed and President Bush signed the Accountability of Tax Dollars Act, which I proposed to help curb waste and make government more accountable to taxpayers. This law requires federal agencies with a budget of $25 million or more to prepare clear financial statements and subject those statements for review by an independent auditor. The agencies must then submit their audited financial statements to Congress and the administration, which will scrutinize the information to ensure each agency is practicing sound financial management. Among the agencies that face mandatory audits under the new law are the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is responsible for overseeing the financial practices of public companies.

Requiring agencies to obtain independent financial audits and be accountable for their budgets is a common-sense reform that will save taxpayers money and help make government more efficient. Moreover, an independent audit opinion may help agency managers ensure internal accountability, measure cost controls, and make the timely and informed decisions necessary for fiscal responsibility.

Strengthening accountability is an important first step toward curbing waste, fraud, and abuse by government agencies, but mandating independent audits alone may not be enough to contain the worst offenders. Consider the dismal performance of the 12 agencies evaluated by the GAO: despite their inability to properly account for billions of taxpayer dollars, these agencies’ budgets either remained static or increased in 2002, even as they wasted another $19 billion. Moreover, some of the employees responsible for this fiscal mismanagement – far from being held accountable – received promotions or pay raises. Clearly, more needs to be done to compel these agencies to be more responsible with taxpayer money.

If a potential bad audit and a reprimand from Congress is not adequate incentive for agencies to put their fiscal house in order, surely the prospect of losing operating authority is enough to engender reform. To that end, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and I recently proposed legislation that would create a presidential commission to identify the most inefficient agencies and programs and recommend them for streamlining or elimination. Specifically, the commission would target agencies that perform duplicate functions, chronically waste taxpayer funds, are no longer necessary, or have failed to meet their objectives.

Upon completion of a two-year review, the commission would submit to Congress a comprehensive list of recommendations and propose legislation to implement the changes. To ensure timely consideration of the reforms and help preserve the integrity of the process, Congress would be required to vote on the legislation, without amendments, in a single up-or-down vote.

Combined with the law requiring independent audits of federal agencies, the commission could be an effective tool in the effort to make government more efficient and more accountable to taxpayers. In addition, this key reform could help restore public confidence in the financial competence of government by strengthening oversight of federal spending and budgetary practices. As chairman of a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee charged with overseeing the fiscal performance of federal agencies, I intend to continue the drive to pass this bill and other reforms designed to promote greater financial responsibility in government.

Colorful but erratic dissenter Justice Oliver Wendell Homes and his fans aside, the thinking that justifies abortion and gay rights as ''constitutional'' would never have made it under the principled jurisprudence that served from the earliest days through the 1960s.

But it was Kelsen, by transmitting his views through the law schools of the 20th century (in books and articles like ''Absolutism and Relativism in Philosophy and Politics''), who set into motion the changes we are seeing today. In a slender volume Beyond Abortion: the Theory and Practice of the Secular State (Franciscan Herald Press, 1973), Notre Dame legal scholar-professor Charles Rice pinpoints Kelsen's doctrines. Where jurists once relied on a long line of tradition--from Aristotle to Cicero, through Blackstone's Commentaries that stressed immutable natural law--Kelsen's ideas called ''positivism'' rule the day.

What Kelsen taught was once thought revolutionary but sadly is almost commonplace today. There is no natural law, one cannot actually know reality; what rules is what seems OK today; what seemed wrong yesterday may be right today. This is positivism. Just as John Dewey was a relativist in philosophy, Kelsen assailed the ideal of certainty in law.

Kelsen's ideas are accepted by Republican-leaning as well as Democratic-influenced jurists. In 1965 in Griswold vs. Connecticut, the Supreme Court first discovered a constitutional ''right of privacy'' in what it called the ''penumbras formed by emanations from the Bill of Rights,'' Kelsen-inspired gobbledygook language of no meaning. Eight years later, it used the spurious constitutional ''right'' to sanction abortion on demand. Now it uses the phrase to endorse homosexual rights--and, dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia predicts, same-sex marriage. A slender majority of the court, led by Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, pay tribute not to natural law but situational ethics that change by the day. This thinking lurches to inevitable catastrophe.

In the end, writes Rice: ''When the positivist is confronted by Auschwitz, his only objections are those of utility or esthetics. It is not useful to kill millions of Jews and the tables might be turned on us some day . . . He cannot say it is wrong because he does not believe he can know what is right or wrong.''

How to halt the rushing tide to legal legislating that can endorse mercy killing or worse? By naming to the Supreme Court, when a vacancy occurs, those who believe in traditional norms of justice with a moral foundation. But the Senate is locked in a tight vise known as the filibuster, where a minority of members can deny a majority their right to vote. The answer is to put heightened public pressure on Sen. Bill Frist's campaign to allow a majority vote on judicial appointments. As of now, 60 votes are required to break a filibuster. A resolution, supported by several senators, will require 60 votes only in the first attempt to break the filibuster. In each attempt after this, the vote requirements would drop by three until it reaches a simple majority of 51 votes.

A majority now would confirm ''original intent'' nominees to the high court. There is nothing more important to America than to rescue the Supreme Court from those who legislate from the bench. President Bush should push for the Frist rule as his No. 1 domestic priority. The ghost of Hans Kelsen should be banished to the musty archives where it belongs.

==>Barry Goldwater