Musings Of An Indie WriterTuesday, February 2, 2010
The budget will split the House caucus
Some polls registered an uptick in Obama’s approval rating following the State of the Union address. It was a typical Obama speech and was covered mostly in light of its promise to reduce the deficit.
So much for that. A few days ago, Obama gave a press conference unveiling a near $4 trillion budget that is set to run a deficit of $1.6 trillion. Because those numbers assume revenues from the defunct cap-and-trade bill and its nearly dead cousin Obamacare and also throw in spending cuts unlikely to materialize, I expect the actual number is somewhere near $2 trillion. For reference, the last time the Republicans had control of Congress (2006), the budget deficit was $248 billion. At the end of the Clinton administration, we were actually running a surplus.
Is it just me, or have the Democrats gone completely mad? Have the Tea Parties, the 2009 elections, Scott Brown, and other recent events not taught Obama anything?
That is easy for me to say. The real problem is that last year’s budget and the stimulus bill locked in massive increases in federal and state spending that rested on 2 questionable assumptions:
1) The economy would recover shortly, and tax receipts would increase
2) Gigantic revenue raising monsters like cap and trade would pass before 2010
Now, the Democrats are in a terrific hole. Reducing spending in any climate, much less a recession is anathema to them. Liberals in the House and Senate have already threatened to derail the minimal cuts to discretionary spending that Obama has outlined. On the other hand, if they continue to rack up deficits of this magnitude, they may find their ability to put their spending spree on the nation’s credit card suddenly cut off by problems in the bond markets or massive inflation. Finally, if they raise taxes to the level necessary to finance the proposed level of spending, they will almost certainly choke off whatever recovery that is coming in the future.
Obama apparently intends to keep punting, hoping that economic recovery will be more robust than his own CBO predicts so that he can avoid the hard choices he is bringing upon himself. The bad news for Obama and for us is that he may achieve the effective bankruptcy of the nation before 2012, when he must stand for reelection.
During the New Deal, Roosevelt’s deficit spending, which was quite large for the time, required him to effectively seize the gold of private citizens to keep the dollar from putting a gun to its head and pulling the trigger. Back then, of course, the United States was on the gold standard and had substantial savings, so Roosevelt’s crude solution was at least workable. Obama’s deficits dwarf Roosevelt’s, and now we have a fiat currency and negative savings. What will we do if our currency is again threatened? Down that road lie Zimbabwe, Chile, and any number of other banana republics.
That is enough economic speculation, however. The more immediate question is whether the budget has a chance in the House. Believe it or not, last year’s budget actually passed with the widest margin since 1997 - 233 yea votes. Budget bills are treated as yearly formalities, but they are not entirely uncontroversial. Moreover, Jay Cost provides this extremely interesting chart:
Those are the vote tallies from last year’s House roll calls that saw high numbers of Democratic defections. We can see the usual suspects - Obamacare and cap and trade - clearly, but look also to the appropriations votes. They are consistently the most controversial within the Democratic caucus, and even the motion to adjourn in Decemeber garnered 29 Democratic defections! For those keeping score, 39 is the maximum number of Democrats that Nancy Pelosi can afford before she must either pick up Republicans or lose the vote.
Cost wonders whether the numbers in that chart represent a nascent backbencher revolt:
These were all partisan votes in that Republicans mostly voted against the Democratic leadership. Two of the bills - HR 2454 (cap and trade) and HR 3962 (health care reform) - were high profile pieces of legislation that attracted a lot of attention. But the rest did not garner nearly as much focus, and several of them are downright obscure. And yet the number of defectors was still high.
It’s striking to see 29 Democrats defect on a concurrent resolution providing for the adjornment of Congress. Or how about 39 Democrats defecting on a bill “to permit continued financing of government operations.” That’s an increase of the debt limit. How could so many vote against it? After all, the House voted through all the spending that required an increase in the debt limit. Yet Pelosi could only muster 218 Democrats to do what absolutely, positively had to be done!
The budget votes will be our key clue to the answer. The Democrats have been mostly mum about the proposal so far, but my guess is that a $2 trillion deficit is dead on arrival at Capitol Hill. Too many Democrats, and not just those in McCain/Bush districts, will have to fall on their swords to vote for it.
Budget fights can be among the nastiest, as the continued operations of the federal government are at stake. The 1995 “government shutdown” is the most recent example, but if we get a repeat of that this time it will be because Democrats will be cannibalizing each other in an attempt to run for the exits. At this point, such an outcome might even be likely.
At this press conference, Obama laughably stated that the government must not treat taxpayer money as “Monopoly money” before blaming his deficits on a “decade of profligacy.” If the Democrats shut down Congress squabbling over this year’s budget, that decade will begin to look awfully good.
Transportation (Non) Security
In one of his previous lives (the law enforcement one) your humble blogster participated in several “covert” operations. That is the main reason that he finds the saga of the underwear bomber of Christmas day especially intriguing.
As “luck” would have it and much to the chagrin of our political masters, a material witness to the events concerning flight 253 happened to be an individual trained in both logic and evidence evaluation. Unless this witness can be either discredited or intimidated into silence, the entire bureaucratic farce designated “transportation security” and erected by the government will stand revealed for the sham that in fact it is.
The witness, an attorney by the name of Kurt Haskell who was a passenger aboard flight 253 avails himself of his legal training in opening his “case” by posing seven questions :
1. Who is the Man in Orange? 2. Did Mutallab know the Sharp Dressed Man? 3. Was it intended that the bomb explode? 4. Did the U.S. Government know that Mutallab had a bomb when it allowed him to board Flight 253? 5. Why is the U.S. Government seeking a plea deal for Mutallab? 6. Why did a fellow passenger call me to discuss changing my story? 7. Why are the important questions being ignored by the mainstream media?I hope that you, dear reader, will follow Mr. Haskell’s discussion of these seven questions at the link provided above and supply your reactions in the comments at the end of this post.
Public perception of the workings of covert government operations have been severely distorted by the entertainment media. In other words: what one views on the entertaining episodes of “24” is so far from reality as to enter the realm of the absurd. In the real world and almost universally, those charged with supervising these operations have little to no hands on experience working “under cover”. The skills required of successful operatives are not necessarily congruent with supervisory abilities. The “bosses” have been promoted/appointed/elected into their supervisory positions on the basis of a variation of the Peter Principal which rewards those skilled in sycophancy and bureaucratic political maneuvering. The “supervisors” almost invariably experience difficulty in managing the often complicated operations. These difficulties arise chiefly from an inability to resist tendencies toward micro management. Political corruption is also an occasional factor. First hand examples of this theory will doubtless supply subject matter for future posts.
In classic Platonic fashion, Mr. Haskell discusses the implications of the possible answers to his seven questions and invites us to; (using an overworked cliche) “connect the dots”. Suddenly, Ms Napolitano’s apparently nonsensical statement that “the system worked” acquires the ring of perverse if partial truth.
In any event, the concept that ultimate transportation security can be achieved if only we surrender more liberty is revealed for the nonsensical fairy tale it has always been.
cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade™
Respect For The Law
In a recent exchange of views about abortion, your Curmudgeon opined that even though all abortions are morally reprehensible, a law that bans all abortions would be a mistake, being unenforceable. He didn't trouble to explain why. He was immediately taken to task by a gibbering idiot -- if we can go by the volume of gibbering, there've been a lot of them around, lately -- who claimed that that was equivalent to saying that the law against murder should be repealed, being "unenforceable." Apparently, said idiot thinks a law is "unenforceable" if there's anyone who dares to violate it.
That's not what makes a law unenforceable.
In a polity that respects, or claims to respect, certain individual rights, a law is unenforceable if its enforcement requires the violation of those rights. For example, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
...would forbid government to compel individuals to accept monitoring devices in their bodies, except for those who had been convicted of a crime for which such an intrusion is part of the prescribed penalty. Clearly, that would make it impossible to enforce a law against the earliest-term abortions: Who, other than the woman going for her "menstrual extraction," could know that an embryo is growing within her?
A law can be also be unenforceable because it simply isn't enforced. Laws against adultery, sodomy, and fornication are excellent examples, though they're also unenforceable because of Fourth Amendment considerations. If the organs of law enforcement refuse to dedicate the necessary resources to enforcing a particular law, it will fall into desuetude.
Finally, a law can be unenforceable because of Objection One. A sufficiently large number of persons willing to break the law and risk the legal penalty will produce a situation wherein, no matter how much enforcement power is brought to bear, selective enforcement will result. Selective enforcement is death for a polity that upholds the rule of law...which should give persons interested in America's prospects pause, when you think about it.
Quite a number of persons will nevertheless back an unenforceable law, for example the laws we collectively call the War on Drugs, because it "sends a message." But to create unenforceable laws to "send a message" is to subordinate the principal function of the law -- deterring predation by punishing predators -- to a desire to express disapproval of some practice. As pundits too numerous to mention have said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
Every unenforceable law weakens respect for law in general. A sufficient number of such laws destroys law as a stabilizing force.
Rose Wilder Lane noted in her book The Discovery Of Freedom that it's not law that protects Americans' persons and property, but rather the near-to-unanimous respect for person and property that Americans feel. In that sense, laws against murder, theft, and so forth are merely codifications of a sentiment shared by all but a very few of us. Without the overwhelming concurrence in their rightness, they would be as impotent, and as widely disrespected, as the War on Drugs.
Note that about 90% of Americans "support" the War on Drugs. That is, they would enthusiastically concur in its rightness and cooperate in its enforcement...unless a family member, or a close friend, were accused. That degree of support is far from enough to make the drug laws enforceable. Comparable majorities supported alcohol Prohibition and military conscription, which came near to undoing the fabric of the Republic before they were repealed.
When several million persons are willing to violate a law despite the risks, the law is unenforceable. People come to understand that through experience and anecdote. They respond, subconsciously, by drawing lines: lines through the law, to divide those statutes that uphold their bedrock conceptions of right and wrong from those that, however wholesome of aspect, strike them as "nice, but not essential." Thus we get the dominance of the personal ethic over the dictates of formal law: a condition that guarantees that law as such will be relegated to "nice, but not essential" status.
Many persons would react to this by saying, "So what? If our personal ethics are consistent around basic principles of right and wrong, we'll be okay." This, to be gentle about it, is not the case. Formal law exists to stabilize society: to create conditions within which individuals can predict what consequences will flow from what decisions and actions. One aspect of that stability is the suppression of mob justice and the regulation of punishments. If one thief is punished merely by being shamed before his neighbors, but another is set swinging by the neck from the bough of a maple tree, deterrence has been disserved. Persons who might be tempted to steal will confront a confusing set of possibilities. Given criminals' characteristic optimism -- believe it or not, no criminal ever expects to be caught and punished -- the trend will be toward more theft, not less.
Perhaps the most important legal development in human history was the lex talionis, most commonly phrased as "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." Talionic justice is often castigated as unthinkably harsh; yet before the talionic principle was articulated, the retribution for a crime was dictated by the emotions of whoever undertook to punish it. Those emotions can run very high, even when the objective damage suffered by the violated party is small. In classical and pre-classical history, many a protracted, bloody tribal feud, and no few wars, were precipitated by the disproportionate punishment of deeds that all parties recognized as criminal.
Even though we no longer inflict corporal punishment on criminals, the talionic principle lurks beneath our penal codes. Crimes of a defined category have a statutorily defined range of applicable penalties. Death for capital murder; life imprisonment for second-degree murder; so many years in prison for armed robbery; so large a fine for this or that kind of fraud. At least, that's how it's supposed to be, though the discretion routinely accorded to trial judges and parole boards has undermined the concept.
When the penalty for a crime is fixed in advance and bears some relation to the damage done by the offense, the deterrent effect of the law is strongest.
Some persons would react by saying, "Well, if deterrence is the goal, why not fix the punishment for every sort of crime at death? Wouldn't that scare us all into behaving properly?" Fortunately, no: It would be far more likely to result in the non-enforcement of all law. Our innate recognition of a scale of justice -- that to treat widely varying offenses as all equally heinous is inherently unjust -- would recoil against it. Also, despite Mankind's supposed bloodthirstiness, we are extremely reluctant to pronounce the sentence of death. Otherwise, the battles over the acceptability of capital punishment would hardly rage as fiercely as they have these past fifty years. It's not just because too many liberals sit on the benches of appellate courts.
The above limitations on human lawmaking and law enforcement have been well established by experience. As the centuries have rolled past, we've learned, often with great reluctance, that we cannot preserve respect for the law without attending to the law's limits: what it must and must not address, and what lies within its power to enforce. Every dismissal of those limits has damaged both the general respect for the law and the well-being of the society that made it. The laws of nature, which no legislature can repeal nor modify, remain forever prior and superior to our notions of proper deportment:
This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Compensation"]
