Are congressional committees still fully committed to their work?

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...