Having the Air Force fly a B-2 bomber overhead during a signing ceremony for a budget bill would have in a different time seemed like overkill. But in our time of both public spectacle and congressional sclerosis, it seems about right.

After months of debate, Congress delivered a tax and spending package that is loved by none, which is usually a good sign. Budgets aren’t supposed to be popular. But this is an unusually ambitious budget — or, to be more precise, pseudo-budget.

First, some context. In 1974, when Congress was up on its hind legs about the many abuses of executive power by Richard Nixon, lawmakers passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. Nixon, who was trying to fend off impeachment in the summer of that year and looking to appease Republicans in Congress, signed the bill in July — in between the publication of "All the President’s Men" and the Supreme Court decision ordering him to release his Oval Office tapes.

Future presidents would always hate the impoundment part of the law, which forbids them from withholding money appropriated by Congress, but they would learn to love the budget part, which created the process we all now know as reconciliation. That was not how it started.

The idea of reconciliation was to increase congressional power by making it easier to produce budgets. Congress passes a nonbinding budget blueprint and can add a line allowing for reconciliation at a later time, as the current Congress did in May. Originally, that reconciliation was to do what the name suggests: reconcile the actual budget with the final congressional priorities in an expedited manner, basically a golden ticket for legislation about the budget — a place of privilege on the calendar and, most importantly, an exemption from the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

It worked as designed at first. The first-ever reconciliation package came in 1980 as lawmakers teamed up to address the scandalously large budget deficit. It might have gone as high as $80 billion, nearly 3 percent of the entire national economy, and action was needed. This sounds quaint in a time where we are rolling toward another $2 trillion deficit this year, more than 6 percent of the economy as a whole. But in those days, it was considered politically important in both parties to at least appear concerned about the debt.

Former President Jimmy Carter signed the package of spending cuts and tax tweaks in the lame-duck session after his defeat, an act of magnanimity and responsible governance equally as........

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