Debt

As the debate begins anew in Washington on the federal budget, it may be an appropriate time to revisit and clarify the more salient points that are driving the issue: the debt limit, the deficit, and the national debt.

Politicians are making self serving public statements that they will not support raising the national debt limit without some manner of nebulous budgetary  concessions and so the question arises what exactly is the national debt limit, and why would our elected officials choose to either raise the limit or allow the nation to go into default.

The national debt ceiling is exactly like the credit limit on a bank issued credit card. The amount you are allowed to spend is a predetermined number and you are not able to spend more than that without the issuing bank raising your credit limit. You must show the bank that you are of a sufficient credit risk with sufficient collateral resources to warrant elevating your limit.

Suppose you have automatic payments registered with that credit card account – if you exceed your limit and the bank does not raise it, you will not be able to meet those financial obligations and you will go into default. Should you default on enough different accounts, or default an excessive amount of times, your credit rating will suffer, making any further borrowing almost impossible. If you are able to secure financing, the interest rate will almost border on the usurious.

This is the situation facing congress at this moment – raise the national debt limit or risk default. It is irresponsible for lawmakers to threaten default; insuring budgetary restraints and responsibility are necessary, but allowing the credit rating of the United States to slip into that of a third world potentate is absurd. The United States must honor its financial obligations; the debate must center on how to do so, not if to do so.

The first step in that debate must center on the deficit, the annual number that delineates the negative budgetary shortfall discrepancy between what the government takes in on receipts and what it expends in the course of its business. This is where a balanced budget must be written  and passed. Those politicians who cry for a constitutional amendment mandating that congress pass a balanced budget are abdicating their most basic fiduciary responsibilities. There are several valid and responsible reasons for having a budget deficit - war, national disaster, economic downturn, etc.- but  altering the constitution to avoid doing so may sound popular but is inherently dangerous for the future financial health of the nation.

What ultimately may be of the greatest harm to the country is the national debt, which in a thumbnail description is the accumulation of all current and previous budget deficits. Included in the debt are such things as Treasury bonds and other such monetary instruments, so the reality is that there will never be a zero sum of national debt. The crushing aspect of the debt however is the interest that must be serviced upon it, which at its current rate makes it impossible to properly manage. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that, if left unchecked, one hundred percent of the money the government receives in tax receipts will go not to bring down the debt but merely to pay the interest on that debt.

The reality is that such inevitabilities are unsustainable and so the hard choices must be made in managing the national debt ceiling, the deficit must be eliminated by a balanced budget, and the debt must be brought into a manageable format so that this nation can thrive and flourish without the debilitating financial strains put upon it by our current leaders and their unwillingness to act in the national best interest.

The Sixteenth Must Go

“In order to form a more perfect union”.

The founders and the framers knew that the Constitution they had written was not perfect and thus this specific phrase contained within the preamble is testament to their belief that subsequent generations would need to amend it and so they created the constitutional mechanisms necessary to do just that.

Throughout our history the overwhelming majority of the amendments to the Constitution have been instituted in the pursuit of that elusive goal of a more perfect union. There have been two specific amendments however have been so ill conceived that one has been repealed and one must be rescinded for the country to fully prosper as it moves well into its third century of being.

One of these two aforementioned amendments passed was intended to regulate conduct by passing legislation aimed at outlawing the creation of a specific item of commerce – alcohol. This led to a decade (1920 -1933) known popularly as Prohibition. The folly of using the United States Constitution for this type of social engineering was repealed and to date there have been no further attempts to amend the Constitution based upon personal conduct.

The second of these amendments is the only one that directly contradicts the intent of the framers and the founders and has become such a blight upon the nation that it must be repealed.

The founding fathers wrote the following very specific language into the Constitution ( Article 1, section 9 )

No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

Their intent was clear: to distribute the required and necessary financial needs of government evenly amongst the states via their respective population. There was never a thought to taxing income, which mandates that the government will first attach your earnings and decide how much of what you have earned you may keep. This is not how the founders intended to fund the cost of democracy. In no way intended to be presented here as the definitive or thorough discussion on the arguments encountered during the debate on the Constitution, the following quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson nevertheless best encapsulates the founders’ firm belief on the nature of how their fledgling nation should be construed:

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.

In an act of legislative malfeasance which best exemplifies the dictum of unforeseen consequences, the Congress passed the sixteenth amendment which reads, in its entirety as thus:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

This completely reversed the intent of the framers of the Constitution. It has led to allowing the government to be first in line to take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned, and for generations to believe that such actions are a de facto part of American democracy.

This is not the American way.

There is no argument amongst the populace that there needs to be proper funding of the government, but an income tax is not the vehicle for that need.

The sixteenth amendment must be repealed.

American Latin

“Qui tacet consentire vidétur” is Latin and has become part of the philosophy and jurisprudence within the American legal system. It translates as ‘‘your silence is taken as your consent”.

It is sadly also becoming the accepted norm, the de facto mindset of those elected and of the electorate.

This nation is being pulled apart and set against each other by self serving opportunistic politicians. They are attempting to separate the basic components of the country founded as the great “melting pot”. False constituencies are being created to facilitate not the best interests of the country, but rather engineered solely to ensure the positions of power now not deserved by those who hold positions of authority within the United States government. We as a nation fundamentally agree on what we want as a people and for our children, optimally delineated within the preamble of the United States Constitution:

in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

Yet we are told by some in Congress that by attempting to undertake those precious aforementioned national goals, we will be irreparably harming an undefined portion of the population, and thus we should do nothing, as if inaction was a solution unto itself.

We are experiencing the result of our elected officials fiddling while our financial stability is burning. Any attempt to deal with the financial crisis is met with howls of discrimination, racism, and wanting to ultimately eliminate portions of the population by restricting their access to the basic fundamental necessities of life and liberty. We should have, must have, national discussions to fully test the viability of the options available to us as we move forward, but to use a type of balkanization is not the way the beacon of freedom around the world should present itself to the nations of the world.

How can we accept the statements from our elected officials that somehow a family in urban Chicago which wants something other than a better future for their children is somehow intrinsically different from a family’s’ aspirations in rural Montana. America is not a zero sum nation. We cannot claim that helping citizens in Miami will somehow come at the cost of the citizens in Maine. We are not a country of tribes, warring against each other for the spoils of war. We are a democratic republic and cannot allow people to whom we have entrusted the security and prosperity of the country to do little but protect their positions of power at the expense of the people.

There should not be a series of claimed minority groups when it comes to the nature of freedom: there is but one constituency in this country that needs to be served by the government.

We, the people.

“Qui tacet consentire vidétur” should not be the Latin phrase that guides this nation, but rather we should remember the Latin that best exemplifies the greatest nation the world has ever known, the nation that from many has come one.

“E Pluribus Unum”

The War Powers Act Reality Check

The War Powers Resolution, generally known as the War Powers Act, was passed by Congress in 1973 over President Nixon's veto to increase congressional control over the executive branch in foreign policy matters, specifically in regard to military actions short of formally declared war. Its central provision expressly prohibits the President from engaging in military actions for more than sixty days, unless Congress votes approval. The politicians at the time believed that this legislation would deny future presidents from entangling the United States in a situation that would mirror Americas’ involvement in the Vietnam War. The debate over this piece of legislation reignites every time the United States military is deployed and politicians seek to deflect their true responsibilities and ignore the essential issue relative to what should be at the fundamental heart of the debate:

What exactly is the purpose of the United States military?

What specific role does America see for its men and women in uniform in the 21^st century?

Historically, the military of a country was utilized by the sitting governement for conquest over an enemy, to plunder and pillage the wealth of the vanquished. If an emperor, king, or whoever, controlled the military, then by default it secured them their hold on the political power of that country.

There can be no debate that the Unites States military is the greatest fighting contingent ever assembled; this is not jingoistic blather. It is fact, by whatever criteria are applied.

The history of the US military, however, is that it has always been a defensive force that has responded only when the nation has first been attacked. The various forces of the military have been employed in cases of natural disasters both here and abroad in clearly defined missions. The mere threat of employing the United States military has always been enough to force aggressor countries to compliance of United Nations mandates. In such instances, the United States has always been part of a contingent of countries and has never acted in a unilateral offensive manner: to do so would be anathema to the people of America and to very essence of a free, democratic and self-governing nation.

But it has now become far too commonplace to manipulate the military for uses that do not meet the requirement of using our men and women of the armed forces in a purely defensive manner. The military has become a plaything for politicians looking to try social engineering and community experimentation once their attempts to do so by legislative fiat in society at large have been met with public resistance and outright elective defeat. There are those in government who believe that the military may be used to correct human suffering in far away lands. A noble cause to be sure, but issues that should be relegated to an entity such as the aforementioned United Nations. The United States cannot relieve suffering throughout the world; to attempt to do so by deploying the military is foolhardy at best.

Diluting the responsibility of the armed forces will inevitably lead to its being used and seen by our enemies as a tool of an aggressive political entity. and not as the defensive fighting unit it needs to be if America is to remain free and the beacon of freedom to the rest of the world.

War is War And Not Something Else

The nature of obfuscation in politics is on many levels an accepted norm. The classic joke of a politician’s response to naming his favorite color as plaid, lest he risk offending a portion of the electorate is regularly expected and no longer raises an eyebrow. The concern, however, is that once elected, the verbal gymnastics employed during the election too often carries over into the serious and life affecting act of governing.

The former standard of such imbecilic conduct was the sight and sound of a sitting president of the United States, under oath, requiring a clarification of a specific query by asking “what the definition of ‘is’ is” It brought much ridicule and derision upon him, deservedly so, but in the larger context it occurred within the framework of a civil trial, hence there were no national security issues at play and so it was easily considered nothing more harmful than a politician simply excelling at the art of obfuscation.

The issue today is far more grievous and has serious implications for national security and the future of a thriving democratic republic based upon a self-governing nation.

The United States participation in the United Nations sanctioned actions in Libya can be debated from within the entire spectrum of political thought. The constitutionality of our involvement in such engagements, the presidential authority to act without congressional pre-approval, and even the basic ‘why only Libya?’ if the intended goal is to protect a people from their slaughter at the hands of their own government are all fundamental questions that must be asked and answered.

But before that necessary dialogue can begin, the art of governmental obfuscation must stop.

The stated government position is that the actions taken in Libya are not ‘war’: the official pronouncement is that we are merely engaged in “kinetic military action”

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘kinetic’ as “active; lively; dynamic”.

While military action would not normally be described as ‘lively’, what else is a military force actively engaged in deploying weaponry anything else but ‘war’?

When a government fails to be honest with its citizenry about the most obvious of issues, it risks its credibility on everything else. The American people may be divided on the proper use of their military, but they know that when that military is firing missiles at another sovereign country, there is little left to the verbal imagination but to describe those actions as ‘war’.

The United States government needs to drop the art of obfuscation when our men and women of the armed forces are putting their lives on the line.

War is not a game of verbal gymnastics, not the art of defining ‘what ‘is’ is”; it is not a ‘police action’.

It is about life and death.

That fact, that reality, in and of itself, demands a basic fundamental and unshakeable level of honesty from a government to its people. Any government that chooses to engage in such simplistic nomenclature nonsense does not deserve the impassioned description of a government,” of the people, by the people, and for the people”.

The Constitutional Purpose

(ed. note: as a matter of practice, the Madison Conservative blog does not single out individuals for any type of ad hominum attacks on any level.  The comments made by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., (D), Illinois, in early March of 2011 on the House floor that are included here are solely for the purpose of establishing the foundation of the discussion point for this blog.)

The following transcription of comments made by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is provided courtesy of C-SPAN.

JESSE JACKSON JR.: “Mr. Speaker, I believe that the answer to long-term unemployment is actually in the Constitution of the United States. Well, let me say that a little differently. It’s not in the Constitution of the United States. It should be in the Constitution of the United States, and one of these days we’re going to get there. We need to add to the Constitution the right to a family to have a decent home. What would that do for home construction in this nation? What would that do for millions of unemployed people? He says we need to add to the Constitution the right to medical care. How many doctors would such a right create? He says we need to add to the Constitution of the United States the right to a decent education for every American. How many schools would such a right build from Maine to California? How many people would be put to work building roofs and designing classrooms and providing every student with an iPod and a laptop? How many ghettos and barrios will actually be touched by such an amendment? In fact, very little that we pass in the Congress of the United States even touches the long-term unemployed. Only thing that touches them that this Congress has access to that can actually change their station in life, is the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Speaker, there’s an even greater America that’s in front of us. It’s the America that adds to our founding document these basic rights.”

Herein lays a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the United States Constitution. The Constitution was established to provide restrictions of the government upon the people. It is not intended to be a list of what the government is to bestow the people; it is intended to inhibit the power of government so that a free society can grow and thrive to the extent of its desires. If we were to follow the line of thought started by Congressman Jackson, the only result would be a socialist state: the government would be the provider of all the needs of its citizenry. The framers and the founders were all to familiar with all manner of despotic rulers and their effects upon their people. The model of democratic self rule was a unique concept, and they wrote the Constitution not a guarantee of government entitlements, but rather as a guarantee that government would not be able to restrict the freedom of this nation.

There are no ‘rights’ entrusted to the government, only responsibilities. The ‘rights’ guaranteed are but to the people of the United States.

The preamble of the Constitution is written the way it is for a reason; we should never lose sight of that fact.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Supreme Court

An effective tricameral governmental structure is only effective if there is a stable balancing agent vested with the authority to assure the full constitutionality of all official acts of the three participants. Under the American formula of a democratic republic, that power has been so deemed as to lie in the judicial arm of government, as an equal partner in government. The United States Supreme Court has the sole responsibility to determine whether actions or legislation taken by the federal executive or either of the two congressional legislative bodies is permissible within the guidelines and restrictions imposed upon them by the Constitution. This authority also extends to issues of law that may occur within state sovereignty. The judiciary, however, must be only deciders of law; it cannot legislate nor act in an executive manner.

A dangerous trend in recent years has been twofold and does not bode well for the continuity of the American form of government.

First, many judicial jurisdictions have opted to operate beyond being only deciders of fact and have moved into the realm of activism that borders on a dangerous form of partisanship. A court should not have the power to enact legislation by fiat: it should only be responsible for mandating that legislation found to be constitutionally lacking be rewritten.  Legal cases and challenges have been instituted by parties purposely choosing specific federal court districts hoping for a particular political slant to be equated into a legal decision. This has diminished the strength of the federal judiciary, as participants of a lawsuit no longer accept rulings of a particular court, knowing they will simply appeal the particular ruling to a higher court, with the intent of reaching the United States Supreme Court.

Therein lies the true danger to a democratic republic, for once the high court opts to hear a specific case, they are immediately burdened with political attacks and a volley of ad hominum assaults. Legal and greater constitutional issues are no longer deemed to be properly resolved, but rather declared tainted by a political slant. When an opening within the highest courts in the land occurs, the only sounds heard across the media and informational landscapes are diatribes of how best to either maintain or  alter the political slant of the court, as if it were being reduced to a matter of political gamesmanship.

A court is designed to hear evidence and to be a decider of fact. Diluting that responsibility in the hope of a short term political position of power is as great a threat to a democracy as any outside force determined to destroy it. A bulwark must be maintained to preserve legal authority.

The Supreme Court of the United States is just that; the highest court in the land, so established in order that the machinations of government as instituted by the members of the tricameral foundation perform their duties within the confines of the United States Constitution.

If we are to remain a free people, we must maintain the integrity of our highest court and remove from a position of power and authority any citizen who attempts to diminish that integrity for political gain. Once the oversight ability of any system is compromised, there is no recourse left for those who look for redress; if it involves a government, the nation it governs is surely to fall.