The Budget Control Act, I recently discovered, is not dead. But the 1974 law, which forms the basis for Congress's annual budgetary process, lives on in a barely recognizable new guise. Through “deeming resolutions,” congressional leaders insert budget language into unrelated must-pass measures and deem a budget to have been adopted.

In the “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013,” Congress gave the chairmen of the House and Senate Budget committees statutory authority to insert in the Congressional Record the language and amounts of a budget resolution, which would then be deemed as adopted. The act also authorized the introduction in each house of a “shell” budget resolution — a concurrent resolution with blank amounts after each dollar sign. This could later be used to convey reconciliation instructions to the appropriate committees to report necessary adjustments in revenue and entitlement laws to bring the government’s overall budget in line with the budget resolution.

The existence of this sleight-of-hand budgetary device made me wonder whether there are any other committees in Congress getting away with such shortcuts, circumventing the normal processes of bringing their legislation to the........

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