Broken Promises

Do you tell the truth? Do you keep your promises? Both questions are asking pretty much the same thing, because a promise is a statement that you will do something or that you will not do something; if you don't keep your promise, then you didn't tell the truth. The usual punishment for not telling the truth and for not keeping a promise is the same – you lose credibility and people tend not to believe you. Every official of the government of the United States and every official of each of the states is required to by Article VI of the Constitution of the United States to promise by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution. However, many government officials at the federal and state level behave as if they have never read the Constitution that they have promised to support, have forgotten what it says, or never had any intention to keep their promise. When they have no respect for the truth or for promises, they should not be surprised when people hold them in low regard. A journalist recently asked a prominent member of Congress where in the Constitution the Congress finds the authority for some of the provisions in the health care reform legislation that recently became law. His response was that there is no authority in the Constitution for most of the things that Congress does. I find such arrogance and contempt despicable, but unfortunately not surprising. A man that could make such a statement without seeing the contradiction between that and the fact that all members of Congress have taking an oath to support the constitution has no morals and no honor. The health care reform legislation is being challenged by the attorneys general of several states because several provisions of it are unconstitutional, but that is the subject of a different discussion.

Speaking of promises, Congress has repeatedly created entitlement programs in which it has made promises to make payments in the future or to pay for services without making sure that the government will have the money to keep those promises. Across the country, state and local governments have done the same thing with the pension funds of government workers. It is easy to make promises; it is not so easy to keep them. It is especially easy for a politician to make a promise that will not have to be kept until after the politician is retired or otherwise out of office, in effect trying to commit someone else to keep the promise. Some states (California being the most prominent example) are on the verge of bankruptcy. If being unable to keep its financial commitments is the definition of bankruptcy, then the United States is already bankrupt. The credit rating agency Moody's has warned that the United States may soon lose its triple-A credit rating if it doesn't get its debt under control. If Moody's and other credit rating agencies took their jobs seriously, the United States would have lost it triple-A credit rating years ago. Social Security began paying out more money this year than it took in this year. As more baby boomers retire, Social Security will become a bigger and bigger drain on the treasury. Medicare is even a bigger threat to the budget. Congress has shown no restraint in creating even more entitlements. Entitlements and interest on the debt are growing so fast that if nothing is done to stop from growing at their present rate, entitlement and interest on the debt will consume the entire federal budget within a decade or two. That means that there will be no money for vital government functions such as defending us from criminals, terrorists, and foreign governments that mean to do us harm. The functions of the government will be reduced to doing nothing more than writing checks. The government will be forced either to break some of the promises it has made – to pay for such entitlements as Social Security and Medicare or to pay the interest on its debt or to inflate the currency so that it makes these payments with worthless money. Either alternative will lead to major social unrest.

Much of the financial problems of the federal government came from its assumption of powers that it does not have under the Constitution. The powers of the federal government are listed (or as lawyers say, “enumerated”) in section 8 of Article I of the Constitution. Actually the powers of Congress are listed there, and the power of the Executive and Judicial branches are listed elsewhere, but the point is that the Constitution attempted to define and limit the powers of the federal government. To hammer home the point, the Tenth Amendment in the Bill of Rights states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” If the federal government had kept itself within the confines of the boundaries set out for it in the Constitution, it would be much smaller, less expensive, and more effective in doing those tasks that the Constitution delegated to it.

What can we do to reverse or lessen the damage? It may already be too late to reverse it, but we can make the damage less severe by electing honorable people who will do more to keep promises already made and make new ones than cannot be kept, people who will actually keep the oath that they are required to make to support the Constitution. We can use the amendment process in the Constitution to strengthen the Constitution and to shrink the federal government back down to a manageable size. Since the Congress has historically shown little restraint and since members of Congress are not likely to propose amendments that will diminish their own authority, I think we need to think seriously of asking our state governments to propose a constitutional convention. Article V of the Constitution provides two methods by which amendments to the Constitution may be proposed. Only one of them has been used for all the amendments so far, and that is a vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress. The other method is a convention that the Congress must call upon application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states. Possible amendments that might be proposed by such a convention might include an amendment to provide term limits for members of Congress. They might include an amendment requiring the federal government to balance its budget each years unless there is an emergency as declared by three-fourths (or some other supermajority) of the Congress, or one that limits government spending to 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product. An amendment might be proposed to require Congress to state in each piece of legislation where in the Constitution it finds the power to do what it is attempting to do. Proposed amendments might clarify how many of the current parts of the Constitution are to be interpreted to frustrate the attempts of government officials to use vagueness of language to abuse their power. Amendments might be proposed to begin the orderly winding down of government programs that have grown “too big to fail.” Many people are fearful of a constitutional convention because there are no limits to what a convention might propose and it might propose bad things, like repealing the Bill of Rights. However, to become effective any amendment must be ratified either by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states or by conventions in three-fourths of the states. Any amendment proposed by a constitutional convention that was extreme or harmful would not be likely to be ratified in three-fourths of the states. We may need a constitutional convention to take our country back from the promise breakers and make it healthier, more durable, and a better place for our children to live.

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?