Eutychus the Scribe

Senators Hatch and Cornyn have introduced a proposed constitutional amendment in the U.S. Senate. Supposedly Cornyn represents me. I must protest!

It is interesting that these “constitutional conservatives” are eager to change the U.S. Constitution. Some want to repeal the 16th Amendment. Some want to repeal or radically change the 14th Amendment. And now Hatch and Cornyn want to change Article I, Section 8, radically. We have a Tea Party governor in Texas who wants to negate Article VI or, barring that to secede from the United States. Many apparently want to pretend that the “general welfare” and “necessary and proper” clauses Article I, Section 8, are purely rhetorical and of no constitutional effect. We had a Tea Party candidate here in Dallas who said if the Tea Party didn’t get its way they should resort to the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. (He was overwhelmingly feated by the Democratic incumbent.) You have to wonder about these self-proclaimed “constitutional conservatives.”

But to the matter of the Hatch-Cornyn amendment. It is called a “Balanced Budget Amendment.” That sounds good until one looks at it and what it would do. The basic thesis would be that Congress would be constitutionally required to pass a balanced budget. (The previous Congress wasn’t able to pass anykind of budget–balanced or unbalanced, largely thanks to Cornyn and friends.)

It was possible in 2000 for Congress to pass a balanced budget. In fact, the budget which George Bush inherited in 2001 from the Clinton administration had a budget surplus! But instead of applying that surplus to reduce the national debt, most of which was left over from the Reagan administration’s fiscal policies, the Bush administration and Republican controlled Congress (1) reduced taxes and (2) increased spending. They also started to wars which were “off budget”–that is, made the budget deficits look substantially smaller than the actual debt. The result doubled the national debt by in eight years. (Incidentally, when one doubles the debt one necessarily doubles the cost of debt service–which is the fifth biggest chunk of our national expenditures after Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and Defense.) The irresponsible fiscal policies, along with repeal of the regulation of derivities and lax regulation of stock markets, banks and mortgage and insurance companies led to the collapse of the economy in 2008.

That collapse required government spending that approached two trillion dollars and dramatically reduced revenues. So the consequences of not addressing the national debt in 2001 and instead adding to it is the main reason for the current debt crises and unbalanced budget. If implementing the bipartisan commission’s won’t instantly balance the budget even with its drastic rewriting of the tax laws and cutting entitlements (Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid) and all discretionary spending, including defense, passing a constitutional amendment won’t do it either.

Interestingly, the Hatch-Cornyn amendment would exempt Congress from balancing a budget when we are at war. Remember, we are at war right now and have been for nearly a decade. So, unless we end the wars started during the Bush years and stay out of any future wars, Congress will be under no obligation to balance any budget!

Furthermore, the amendment would require a 2/3rds majority in both the House and Senate to pass any tax increase. We should know from the record that getting 2/3rds of Congress to vote for any tax increase. (It isn’t clear whether or not the “temporary tax cuts” passed last December could be allowed to lapse.) The obvious intention is to force any balancing of budgets to be through cuts. But anyone who has engaged in any of the budget balancing exercises knows that it is simply impossible to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget without catastrophic consequences. Those of us who participated in those exercises know that just to balance the budget, significant tax increases as well as draconian cuts in expenditures will be required. The bipartisan commission appointed to make proposals came to the same conclusion.

What more, cuts in government spending will increase unemployment, which reduces revenue and increases government spending. In fact one of the real difficulties is that a sensible approach to balancing the budget by increasing taxes and cutting expenditures (something that would have been possible in 2001 when the economy was overheating) is that in a weak economy increasing taxes and cutting spending aggravates the economic problems. State and local governments and many private sector contractors are, in fact, cutting jobs as the stimulus winds down. That is why the unemployment rate remains high. Unemployed workers do not pay taxes; underemployed workers pay less taxes. Both require more government services, which drives up expenditures creating more debt.

Now Tea Party and Republican folk like to talk about returning to the principles of the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution. They reveal their ignorance of American history. In the period from 1776-1787 the United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation. The United States was on the verge of collapse under that government. The confederacy was deeply in debt, partly due to the cost of the revolutionary war and some other problems. But it was hamstrung when it came to raising revenue to pay off those debts and pay for the operation of a very small, limited confederate government. The fiscal situation was so bad that money issued by the Congress,  as the saying goes, “wasn’t worth a continental.” The government was finding it impossible to borrow, because it had no way to pay back the loans. That wasn’t the only problem with the Articles, but it certainly was a major one that led to the drafting of the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787.

In point of fact, the Articles of Confederation were the Tea Party’s dream–and the nightmare for those who actually lived in a country governed by them. The men who gathered behind closed doors in Philadelphia in 1787 secretly to draft a new Constitution knew that the confederacy wasn’t working. They also knew from history that confederacies don’t last. About the only confederacy I can think of that lasted more than a couple of decades is the Swiss confederacy. (And I am thinking of confederacies that go back 2,500 years!) The writers of the Constitution made sure that the national government under the new Constitution could tax to raise revenue to pay off its debts and to pay for its operation. They made sure that the new government had the resources and power to “lay and collect Taxes” and “to provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States.” (Article I, Section 8)

Incidentally, they also bailed out the states which were also heavily in debt. Some of those founding fathers in Philadelphia left for a short period of time to go to New York City, where the Congress of which they were members was meeting to vote for the Northwest Ordinance which subsidized those speculating in lands west of the Allegeny Mountains (including Washington and several other members of the Philadelphia Convention). The ordinance also provided grants for the establishment of public schools in the territories. The new government under Washington did things like create the Bank of the United States. The Hatch-Cornyn amendment is an attempt to overthrow the Constitution and the United States of America.

The “historical” fantasies of the Tea Party and GOP remind me of a line in the TV series I, Claudius. To paraphrase the line: “The Republic isn’t what it once was; what is more, it never was what it once was.”