Peter Schiff for Senate

Yesterday, I shook hands with a candidate for public office for whom I actually look forward to voting for. Usually, I don't so much vote for a candidate as I do vote against his opponents. Peter Schiff is running to become the Republican candidate for United States Senate from Connecticut. This is the seat for which Christopher Dodd decided not to run for reelection. Schiff and Dodd are nearly polar opposites. Dodd is a career politician, having served in the U.S. Senate since 1981 and before that the House of Representatives since 1975. His father was also a U.S. Senator. This is the first time Schiff has run for public office, and he credibly asserts that he doesn't want to be a politician, but no one else will step up to the plate to do the things that need to be done, and that it would not bother him at all if he served only one term. His father is in prison as a federal income tax protester. Schiff is a money manager, president of Euro Pacific Capital, and jokes that part of his job is to rat people out to the IRS, a chore that he does, but does not relish. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Dodd pursued policies that cause the housing bubble and its subsequent collapse. Schiff had warned everyone who would listen that a housing bubble was developing and that the United States would have a severe recession. Instead of going into detail about Schiff''s policies, I refer the reader to YouTube, which is full of videos by and about Schiff and to his website, Schiff for Senate. For anyone familiar with Congressman Ron Paul, I would say a quick and dirty way of thinking of Schiff's policies is that he would take pretty much the same stand on any issue that Ron Paul would. His main message is that the debt the the government has accumulated is more than it will be able to pay and even with the current low level of interest rates that a serious crisis will arise when interest rates go up, as they inevitably must. For reasons of financial responsibility and Constitutional principles, he advocates a drastic reduction in the size of the federal government. Does Peter Schiff stand much of a chance? I doubt it. After all, this is Connecticut we are talking about here. However, Scott Brown surprised a lot of people by becoming a Republican Senator from Massachusetts. The most likely Democrat candidate for the position is Connecticut's present Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, who is leading all of his potential opponents in the polls by at least 20 points. I have donated money to Peter Schiff's campaign and have volunteered my services to help. Now that the weather has gotten much better, I am going to go outside to peal the “Dump Dodd” bumper sticker off my car and replace it with one that says “Schiff for Senate”. Then, I will put up the yard sign.

Inefficiency - Not a Bug, but a Feature of the Constitution

A filibuster is a means of slowing down or preventing a vote on legislation in the U.S. Senate by refusing to end debate. The rules of the Senate allow a filibuster to be stopped by cloture, which is a procedure to end debate on a bill, but cloture requires a vote of 60 percent of the Senate. Some of the same people in Congress who argued in support of filibustering judicial nominees of President Bush in 2005 are now arguing that filibustering health insurance reform legislation in the Senate is unconstitutional and are arguing for the reconciliation process to avoid the need to have 60 votes to stop a filibuster from preventing its passage in the Senate. A filibuster, they say, in anti-democratic because it blocks the will of the majority. A filibuster certainly does frustrate the will of a majority in the Senate and, even if the filibuster ultimately fails to stop legislation, it creates inefficiency by slowing the process down. However, neither frustrating the will of the majority nor slowing down the process makes a filibuster unconstitutional. In fact, the Constitution is all about making it difficult for a majority to prevail and about slowing down the process of making new laws. If the people who created the Constitution had wanted to create a quick and efficient process of turning the will of the majority into legislation, there would not even be a United States Senate, which is not very democratic, since states with widely different populations are each represented by two Senators. Instead, there would just be a House of Representatives and a bill would become law by a simple majority vote. The President would not have the power to veto legislation, because that would frustrate the will of the majority. Instead, the Constitution requires that in order to become law, the same version of a bill must be passed by both the House of Representatives by majority vote and it must signed by the President (or it becomes law without his signature if he does not sign or veto it within ten days and Congress is still in session at the end of the ten-day period. If the President vetoes the bill (by returning it to Congress or by doing nothing while Congress adjourns within ten days after the bill is presented to him), then the bill must again be passed by both houses of Congress, but this time by a two-thirds vote in each house. Even then, the Supreme Court can frustrate the will of the majority of Congress by declaring legislation unconstitutional. The Constitution is all about slowing down the process and making it difficult for the will of the majority to prevail. If the goal of the Constitution was to efficiently implement the will of the majority, it could have just created the House of Representatives and had given it the power to create the rest of the government and to change the rules whenever it pleased, with no separation of powers, checks and balances, requirements of supermajorities, or any of the other “inefficient” and “undemocratic” features. The founders of the United States were not opposed to majority will, but they were aware that majorities can be very temporary and can base decisions on emotion rather than careful thought and planning. In other words, they preferred that legislation be passed by a slow process that makes it unlikely that legislation gets passed without broad support. The process of passing laws was intended to be inefficient. The process of amending the Constitution even more strongly indicates the purpose of slowing down the process and making more difficult for the will of a simple majority to prevail. An amendment to the Constitution needs a vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress to be proposed and needs to be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states to be ratified – hardly an efficient process. Actually an amendment can be proposed by a convention call by Congress on the application by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states and an amendment can be ratified by conventions in three-fourths of the States, but these methods are not commonly used. The inefficiencies in creating laws and Constitutional amendments were features of the system, and not bugs.

The filibuster itself has an interesting history, which is stated briefly on the website of the United States Senate at http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Cloture.htm. Originally, a bill could be debated endlessly in both houses of Congress. Unlimited debate became impractical in the House of Representatives because of it had more members than the Senate, so the rules of the House of Representatives no longer allow for unlimited debate. The first limitation on unlimited debate in the Senate came with a change in the Senate rules in 1917, when debate could be ended by a cloture vote of two-thirds of the Senate. The number of votes needed for cloture was changed from two-thirds to 60 percent in 1975. If endless debate in the Senate was consistent with the Constitution even without the possibility of a cloture vote to stop it before 1917, it must still be consistent with the Constitution when it can now be stopped with a cloture vote.

In short, the inefficiency of lawmaking in the United States is not such a bad thing. However, while we can tolerate inefficiency, why do we need to tolerate the enormous expense?

State of the Union Address: ... and the Ugly

The last two posts were about the “good” (parts I agree with) and the “bad” (parts I disagree with) in the State of the Union address. This is about the “ugly”, the parts that just don't work at all.

When President Obama, announced his spending freeze of about 17 percent of the Federal Budget, he said that the freeze would not start for a year and said that is how budgeting works. At that point there was laughter from the audience. No, Mr. President, that is not how budgeting works – that is how my ex-wife thought that budgeting works. The way budgets work (outside the Beltway, anyway) is that you control your spending so that it does not outstrip your income. Most businesses and families can tell that you can borrow for emergencies, or borrow in order to take advantage of an opportunity to increase income, but you avoid it otherwise. After you have increased discretionary spending to unsustainable levels, you do not freeze the spending at those levels, you lower the spending. That is how budgeting works. When voters divorce the politicians that are supposed to represent them in Washington in 2010 and 2012, the out of control spending will be one of the reasons. He did advocate that Congress establish a bipartisan commission to come up with ideas to cut the deficit, but his motivation appeared to be to get political cover by getting Republicans on a commission that advocates raising taxes as a way of decreasing the deficit. If I thought revenue from increasing taxes would actually be applied to reducing the deficit, raising taxes wouldn't bother me that much, but it never works that way. In fact I think that paying for expenditures with taxes is better than paying for them with borrowing, which just kicks the can down the road, but taxes are a relatively minor issue compared to spending. When the proposal to create a bipartisan deficit reduction commission died in the Senate, the President said that he was establishing such a commission by executive order, which I think shows at least a mild disrespect for the separation of powers. My main objection, however, it is that a commission is just a distraction, a way to appear to be doing something about reducing the deficit without really doing it.

The ugliest part of the speech was near then end when after saying that with “all due respect for separation of powers,” the recent decision of the Supreme Court that a law limiting expenditure of corporations and other organizations (including non-profit organizations and labor unions) overturned a century of law and would open the floodgates for influence by special interests including foreign corporations. He went on to emphasize that foreign organizations should not be able to influence elections in the United States. This was ugly on many levels. The President has as much right as anyone to criticize the Supreme Court and its decisions, but doing it in a State of the Union address with the members of the Supreme Court seated just a few feet in front of him and unable to respond was totally inappropriate and lacking in class. Justice Alito could not contain himself and shook his head and muttered under his breath what appeared to be “not true”. What was not true was that the decision had any effect at all on foreign corporations. Foreign corporations and foreign governments continue to be forbidden to influence elections in the United States. One would expect the President and his speech writers to do some fact-checking before such a major speech, especially about a court decision, since President Obama is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former instructor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I downloaded the decision, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission and began to read it, but it is very long (giving the impression that Supreme Court justices think that they get paid by the word), so I skimmed over it to get the gist. I didn't see anything that remotely suggested that it lifted any restrictions on foreign corporations. To paraphrase the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the President is entitled to his own opinion, but he is not entitled to his own facts. If he keeps making up facts to support his rhetoric, some day he may face a whole chorus of people chanting, “You lie, you lie.” He is lucky that the people in his audience had enough respect for decorum not to shout out what many of them were thinking. I know I find myself shouting a lot at the television lately.