08 July 2010

The Great Debate


(World Headquarters, Sococtra Enterprises LLC)

I was trying to stay in touch with a game in which nothing happened for 72 minutes while reviewing resumes in a teleconference. It was surreal. Then the Spanish scored in the 72nd minute and life continued to go on while some of us wanted to run out in the street to show solidarity with a silent Berlin.

I had been toggling from resume to ESPN web site and back, trying to make recommendations and missed the goal. Then a few minutes later it was done, Germany was gone. I became aware that there was a minor riot in progress in the outer office.

Matilda came back and stuck her head in my office, her hair awry. “Boss, there are a couple guys out here and they are hot about that story you put out.”

I leaned back and pushed my straw hat back and stubbed out my Lucky.

“Send ‘em in. We are always open.”

My eyes opened with astonishment. The Professor and The Judge are barely in the Eastern Time Zone, much less in my office, but there they were in the flesh.

They couldn’t be more different. The Judge was a career JAG officer. The Prof still lives in the college town where we were roommates a zillion years ago. The Judge could still slip into his dress blues if he needed to, and the Prof has a signature ponytail that, like the Judge’s short hair, has assumed a timeless look.

One thing they share is an athletic carriage that belies the years under their keels. The Judge cycles and plays aggressive racket sports. The Prof still takes to the court to work his hoop dreams with men two decades younger than himself.

Accordingly, I was not surprised to see that they were animated and had something to say. I gestured to the conference table in the middle of the room, under the print of the first Japanese plane to sucker-punch the Pacific Fleet that Sunday morning.

They sat, and the Prof cleared his throat. “You really screwed the pooch on the story yesterday, Vic. Federalist #29- the one about limiting regulations is not worth wasting the water to flush down the toilet. Publius is nuts on that. Examining the cost of regulations to people and personal liberty, is total bullshit. That is like saying that you violate my personal rights because you do not let me shit openly on your lawn. #29 IS what we were doing since we started all the deregulation and rolling back the much needed Environmental rules. Look at the Gulf and the oil on Lake Pontchartrain.”

I sighed. I knew it was going to come to this, but it is an ugly thing and we had to talk. “Listen, Doc, I am neither for nor against a simplistic approach to this. But we have an abyss in front of us and if we don’t start having a rational discussion we are going to fall into it hard. I am Keynsian enough to know that an abrupt termination to spending will simply strangle the recovery. On the other hand, we cannot go on as we are, and what Publius is trying to do is provoke discussion on alternatives to a coming deficit that will overwhelm the institutions.”

“We are about to whack Defense because there is nowhere else to find the discretionary money. I have already been through that, 1991-2000, and what lies at the end is some cataclysm, either narrowly bounded like the Trade Center and Pentagon or maybe something really spectacular.”

“The point in this exercise is to propose solutions. This is very much of the Tea Party bedrock, so what is the constructive alternative?”

The Prof sat back, and I could see his body language relax. “I wish we could do what those three Amendments propose, though they are way too simplistic to work. They might, in three circumstances- if the US population would return to 150 million, where it was when we were in grade school, if the wealthy class was more civic-minded and less greedy, and if the half of America that would be “disappeared” is the slacker class. It is a pity none of that is ever going to happen.”

He leaned forward with emphasis. “We went to school at a time when the Vets of WWII paid enough taxes so that we went to schools that had more money than they could spend. We benefited from that. What about our grandkids? They have a limited future with the 12.5% rule in Federalist #30.”

The Judge smiled the rueful smile of experience. “I'm sure you'll hear from all the lawyers you know about this, so I felt like I had to come down and tell you what I thought in person.”

He got up and looked out my big window that looked out on the small knot of German fans down below marching glumly away from the sports bar at Ballston Commons.

“As you may or may not recall, I taught Constitutional Law this past year, and it was an opportunity, and a bit of a luxury, to revisit the Constitution and its context.”

“When John Marshall's court, in Marbury v. Madison decided that the judiciary was the branch of government that determined the constitutionality (and hence the validity) of acts by the legislative branch, the Jeffersonians were outraged. A cynic would say the outrage was due to their concern over protecting the peculiar institution of slavery, but their high road argument was: the three branches are equal, so each branch decides for itself if its acts are Constitutional. If a legislative act is not Constitutional the legislature is accountable to the electorate for its misdeeds...giving the electorate the last word on the issue.”

He gestured gravely across my desktop litter of coffee cups from the Starbucks next door at the Weston, the full ashtray and the cards from the morning’s game of solitaire.

“Your proposed spending amendment removes accountability from the system, leaving it to the courts which are not accountable.

Whether or not a piece of legislation or a fiscal policy is good or bad should be left to the voters. If the voters are too indifferent or stupid to get rid of elected officials who are acting against their wishes, then they have the government they deserve.”

“The analogy I'd use here is legislation that creates term limits. There are lots of bad things about term limits. They create one issue-candidates, give real power to unaccountable staffers and lobbyists, but the real bottom line is that laws like that we voters cannot be trusted to get rid of bad elected officials. It just forces us to re-cycle them periodically.”

“The point is accountability. Balanced budget amendment or not, our officials have to be held accountable for what they do.

You're assuming that the electorate doesn't agree with the way our officials are doing things and that the electorate would agree with your solution. The folks in WV thought Byrd was their answer...would they have wanted him term-limited? Do they care, when they're living below the poverty line, whether the government has to build a deficit to pay unemployment benefits or whether a government contractor making a six figure salary has to pay 50% on his federal income tax? I'm not sure what the electorate thinks, or if it thinks, but unless you're planning a coup, it's the people who vote (or don't bother) who are ultimately responsible for the choices that are being made.”

“You know the funny thing?” I asked. “Senator Byrd was buried in Columbia Gardens right next door to Big Pink. He never did go back to West Virginia. He was a fraud. He was really from here.”

“Far out,” said the Prof.

The Judge sat down and folded his hands in a steeple. “The real problem is- I think De Tocqueville identified it as a potential weakness in the American experiment with democracy- is that our government is now a source of income and benefits to much of the electorate...in many areas candidates are judged on the amount of money they will provide the voters.”

The Prof perked up. “Every national crisis or war seems to jump the size of Federal Government as a percentage of GDP.” He declaimed gravely. “For a while this was OK. This cannot go on any longer. We have hit the limit. It is time to think about the stories about how President Jefferson stressed out about how much money he would allocate to the Lewis and Clark expedition. I think I read that he was counting it down to the number of pencils that would be provided. Going from that to $3 Trillion per year? It is no wonder we cannot grapple with this.”

The Judge nodded. “Voters are in fact not stupid or indifferent, they're just self-interested. Read the rest of the Federalist papers. If you want to change the Constitution to get to the root problem, you'd have to do something to fix that basic conflict of interest: a person will not vote to eliminate the public tit on which he happens to be sucking.”

“If I were going to fix it, I'd go after the way Congressional districts are drawn and require a grid or pie-slice pattern based on population density: putting large cities at the intersection of more than one district. This will reduce the number of congressmen who represent a homogenous constituency. A person, for example, who is accountable to urban, suburban and ex urban voters is less likely to automatically favor high cost social programs than someone whose constituents are almost exclusively inner city.”

“Oh, and as to the other issues. I used to be a regulator, I will tell you that adding new items to the checklist used before a regulation can be issued will simply add bureaucracy in both the executive and legislative branches and create new areas of practice for K Street law firms. As is now the case, the "citizenry" most active in its challenges will be the regulated community...utilities, banks, chemical manufacturers, food producers, those instutions. The amendment Publius proposes just gives them additional points of attack.

“Remember: regulators work for the President, so if they're over-reaching, there is political accountability. I am not sure why you'd want to get those buffoons in Congress into the business of supervising the agencies, and, again, they'd be employing way more staff to do so.”

“I hear you on that,” I said, “I almost was one, back in the day, and I wouldn’t trust me any further than I could throw me.”

The Judge and the Prof nodded. “And anyway, the point was to provoke some serious discussion.”

“Well, Publius did that,” said the Judge. “And obviously there's more, but without liberal application of cold beer, the bearings in my brain seize up and the whole thought process stops.”

“We can fix that,” I said. “Willow is right across Fairfax Drive.”

“I don’t drink anymore, Vic.” He smiled that droll smile of his. “But I don’t mind watching.”

The phone rang, and I punched it up on speaker. It was my attorney pal in San Diego who went directly into broadcast mode:

“Vic, you are effing nuts. We are where the Brits were in 1957. We must realize and act on the fact that we cannot as a country spend like drunken sailors on every fucking military toy, outsource expenditure, pension, disability, social entitlement program, etc. anymore. These Bush wars (including TSA and GWOT) and Federal outsourcing to the private sector on top of already full military spending are just bleeding us to death.”

“Someone has to have the courage to simply do it. I think it will take some years more of an exquisitely painful economy before we get to the point of gross, meat-axe chopping of programs. I do believe that if we had a mandatory, functional national health system with limits on what it provides depending on age and productivity, a lot of the outsourcing, double- and triple-pension dipping and other entitlements could be cut drastically. But what I think doesn’t matter. The meat axe has to come out at some point. And the cutting is something everyone can agree on as a general proposition. It’s just that the devil is in the details—gore my ox or yours?”

“Hey, buddy, I agree with you.” I said. “But the Judge came up with the only decent short term answer to something really unpleasant and unpalatable. We are going out for a beer- but this discussion is not over. It is just beginning, God help us.”

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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