Letters from an Ohio Farmer

Changing Direction

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

Much good has been done in Washington recently.  I do not refer to the details of the debt reduction agreement, some of which we have already noted, but to the change it signifies—a change of course for the country. Turning around a fleet of aircraft carriers is child's play compared to turning around the ship of state, but I believe we see before our eyes the signs of a great, ponderous movement of America in the right direction. We owe this hopeful movement largely to the determination of the constitutional conservatives within the GOP and to the good judgment of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives.

If you wonder why liberals are in a funk, why the President's approval ratings are hitting rock-bottom, why he signed off on the debt reduction agreement in virtual secrecy, why he is being criticized openly by progressives and even being compared to the feckless Jimmy Carter, why there is disarray within the Democratic Party, you need look no further than to those who elected a GOP majority in the House, the courage of the Representatives who were elected, and the prudence of Speaker Boehner.  He got almost everything he could reasonably have hoped for in the debt reduction agreement, producing the most radical reorientation of government in our generation. President Obama and the Democrats agreed to massive spending cuts, with more to come, and no tax increases.

This is a strategic and tactical disaster for the progressives and the Democrats, but, far more important is that the debt ceiling debate exposed what Speaker Boehner calls "the arrogant habits of Washington" and opened fundamental political and constitutional questions.  The debate in Washington is shifting away from the favors government might bestow to the question of the proper role of government. As satisfying as his political victory must be, Boehner should be most encouraged by the opening now created to begin a broader conversation about big-government liberalism—really limitless-government liberalism—and why it must be reined in.

If those who brought this about remain resolute, there is a chance of bringing American government back within the bounds of the Constitution.  Boehner and his Republican supporters are beginning to disprove an assumption held by progressives and liberals (and the media) since the New Deal: that government will always grow in size and scope, that all spending increases are permanent. This is a historic change, a movement toward re-establishing public recognition that there are some things it is better not to ask government to do (see Constitutional Lines). The ear of the public is now listening to the argument for limited self-government. If their elected representatives and other public leaders can continue to explain why limiting the power of the federal government is a good thing, we have the opportunity to form public sentiment into a durable governing consensus.

During the debate over the debt ceiling, much was said about how our government is so divided that it is dysfunctional, and how the solution to the perceived problem is bi-partisanship. Some went so far as to assert that the purpose of government is efficiency. Others argued or implied that a parliamentary system would be preferable to the constitutional one we have. After all, there are problems in the world, and our government is not solving them. 

We continue to hear such assertions on a daily basis, but they miss the point. The fact is that our Constitution builds in division (see The Sense of the People); it deliberately makes it difficult to form majorities, and even more difficult to hold them. The Constitution's purpose is not efficiency.  Our constitutional government is not unified, as is, for example, the British Parliamentary regime (we note in passing that the British prime minister speaks for the government, while our president speaks for his administration, only a part of the government). With its federalism, separation of powers, bi-cameralism, and other inventions of prudence, our republican regime intentionally divides, checks, and balances power, so that,

in the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good.

Of course, this means that large issues cannot be quickly resolved. Changing direction in our constitutional regime is wonderfully and deliberately complicated.

The easiest and quickest way to form part of our constitutional majority is through the House of Representatives.  Should we be surprised that the new majority in the House—formed but two years into the majority that won the presidency and both branches of Congress for the Democrats—should assert itself?  And should we be surprised that the President's response is to ask this newest majority to become bi-partisan (read "Democrat")?  Politics is not rocket science.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, along with the first Republican Senate majority since 1954, alerted us to divisions in the American electorate that had been muffled during the prior fifty years. Since then noisy debates have continued, with Republicans losing the Senate, then regaining it, losing the presidency, then winning the House, then losing it, and so on. We will need more than a few electoral cycles—and continued conversation and persuasion from the Republicans—to see whether the determination to limit government will take root in public opinion and become the principle of a new governing majority in American politics. In the meantime, let the divisions and the arguments for and against constitutional limits continue. Public reflection and constitutional deliberation is our strength, not our weakness.

Ohio Farmer

Constitutional Lines

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

We have observed in these letters that the recent debt ceiling debate reflected deep divisions in Washington, D.C., but that those divisions, in turn, reflected the citizenry’s ambivalence about how big government should be, how much it should do, and how much it should tax, borrow, and regulate.  The first phase of the debt ceiling debate ended with legislation to raise the nation's legal borrowing authority by $900 billion and to cut planned federal spending over the next decade by a little more than that amount.  Thus, Congress and the president achieved Speaker of the House John Boehner's goal to match any debt ceiling increase, at least dollar-for-dollar, by deficit reductions.

The legislation also sets in motion a second phase, where a "super committee" of six members of the House of Representatives (three from each party) and six senators (also three from each party) will endeavor to reduce the nation's deficit spending over the next ten years by a further $1.5 trillion.  If the committee agrees on a plan by November 23, 2011, Congress approves it in an up-or-down vote without the possibility of offering amendments by December 23, 2011, and the president signs it, the debt ceiling will be increased by $1.5 trillion.  If the committee can't agree on a plan, or submits one the Congress votes down or the president vetoes, the debt ceiling will be increased by $1.2 trillion, and automatic reductions of federal spending by the same amount over the next decade will take effect – spending cuts evenly divided between discretionary domestic programs and national defense spending.

It is remarkable that, three years after the Democrats' across-the-board victories in the 2008 elections, deficit reduction has become the top item on the national political agenda.  The most important cause of this change in the political weather is the emergence of the Tea Party movement, which took shape in 2009 and propelled Republican gains in the elections of 2010.  That movement remains disparate – it has no headquarters, no single leader, and no agreed upon platform.  Yet some core ideas do connect all of the Tea Party's factions and actions. One friendly observer described the Tea Party essence as "populist constitutionalism," since its "divergent groups agree that the federal government has, over the last several decades, stepped further and further outside of the bounds of the Constitution."  Some of the movement's prominent figures describe themselves as "constitutional conservatives."

The endeavor to re-establish limits to the government's sphere of action and authority is highly laudable, and fully consistent with the logic and spirit of the American founding.  That undertaking will, however, be an intellectual challenge.  Reasonable patriots may disagree about the location of the line the authors of the Constitution drew separating what the government may do from what it must not do.  They may disagree, as well, about whether the logic of the Constitution countenances informal adjustments to the location of the government's boundaries over time, or demands formal adjustments only, using one of the procedures for amending the Constitution specified in its fifth article. 

For example, the power of Congress to declare war, specified in Article I, has fallen into disuse.  America hasn't declared war against any nation since 1941, yet has been involved in a number of wars over the past 70 years, some of them large and prolonged.  Does constitutional conservatism, rightly understood, entail retroactively designating all of these wars – including Korea, Vietnam, Operation Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan – illegitimate for never having been formally declared?  If so, then either Congress must declare war to authorize future martial actions, or the nation must amend the Constitution to give explicit legitimacy to the kinds of authorizations Congress has come to rely on, such as the Tonkin Gulf resolution that was the legal basis for the war in Vietnam.  If not, then resolutions and authorizations that fall short of formal declarations of war have acquired a de facto constitutionality: They aren’t mentioned in the Constitution, seem not to have been envisioned or favored by the Constitution’s authors, have not been the subject of any constitutional amendment, yet have gained acceptance as the way the federal government arrives at decisions about military actions.

The fact that there are disputes about the location of the line between what the government may and may not do, and about whether that line is bright and tight, or wide with shades of gray, does not invalidate the constitutional conservative argument that erasing any such line renders America a very different kind of republic.  James Q. Wilson, one of the preeminent American political scientists of the last half century, helps us understand this. The ultimate meaning of the triumph of the New Deal, according to him, is the collapse of the "legitimacy barrier."  Since its fall, he argued, "political conflict [has taken] a very different form.  New programs need not await the advent of a crisis or an extraordinary majority, because no program is any longer 'new'—it is seen, rather, as an extension, a modification, or an enlargement of something the government is already doing.  Since there is virtually nothing the government has not tried to do, there is little it cannot be asked to do."

The correct label for the alternative to limited government is not big government, but unlimited government.  The destruction of all legitimacy barriers creates a new constitutional logic in which government grows, not just very big, but limitlessly big.  All the forces – political, economic, and judicial – that might constrain it are rendered ineffectual.

This deformation of our republic has gone on so long, and acquired so much inertial strength, that the Tea Party movement's mission is politically as well as intellectually audacious.  We have had occasion to note in these letters Abraham Lincoln's argument that "public sentiment is everything" in American democracy: "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.  Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.  He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed."

The ultimate goal of constitutional conservatism is to mold public sentiment into a broad, durable consensus in favor of rebuilding legitimacy barriers in American government.  This is not a task that will be accomplished by one legislative fight over the debt ceiling, or in one or two election cycles.  Conservatives, constitutional and otherwise, sometimes speak as though the establishment and perpetuation of the New Deal is the result of some kind of coup d'état.  The fact is, we have this bloated government because we, the people, have shown our favor to the expansion of government's activities far more reliably than to their contraction.  The success of constitutional conservatism will depend on exercising the statesmanship that carefully leads the people to set aside their acquired tolerance for a government that purports to have a program for every problem, and rediscover their older apprehensions that any government strong enough to give you anything you want is also strong enough to take away anything you have.

Ohio Farmer

In Search of Monsters

To the Members of the 112^th Congress:

"Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States." This is the first sentence in President Obama's recently issued Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities.  Is it true?

It seems that there have always been, and until human nature changes there will always be, monstrous tyrants in the world doing monstrous things to anyone they can get in the grip of their claws. Whole nations seem capable of becoming bloodthirsty mobs.  Some rather nasty tyrants have been in the headlines lately.  Presumably Americans, who don’t like tyranny of any degree and who began our progress in the world proclaiming the natural right to overthrow tyrants, are especially opposed to tyranny that is atrocious and genocidal.  We could probably get 100% of sane Americans to agree that it is desirable to prevent it. But does this make preventing it a "core national security interest" and a "core moral responsibility" of the country?  

If men were angels there would be no atrocities to trouble us, but until men become angels, to implement this Directive will require endless American intervention across the sinful and suffering world.  America would have to become the "universal landlord," to use a colorful Shakespearean phrase, and this would be neither morally desirable nor strategically feasible, even assuming we were determined to exert all our means to this end.  If—unmindful of these moral and strategic truths—we actually meant what we say in the Directive, we would need urgently and radically to increase American spending on our armed forces.  We are certainly not going to do that. To the contrary, the President and his entire administration have taken pains to make clear that they intend to reduce American military power.  The President issued the Directive at the very time when he was emphatically making known his willingness to cut American defense spending drastically as part of his domestic negotiations over the debt ceiling. So, we do not mean what we say in this Directive, and everyone can see that. America is announcing its obligation to intervene to prevent evil in the world at the very same time that it is diminishing its ability to do anything about it. This is not "moral responsibility" but the height of moral irresponsibility.  It is moralistic boastfulness.

Given America's deteriorating defense posture, the President's Directive seems perfectly calculated to achieve moral bankruptcy in the eyes of the world to complement our actual bankruptcy at home.  From the victims of tyrants and their sympathizers it will bring resentment as they see us giving mere lip service to our moralistic commitment. From the tyrants—who are not in the habit of paying heed to weakness—it will bring increasing contempt for our boastful limp-wristed moralizing that speaks loudly and carries no stick.  

The President’s Directive also represents a further subordination of American foreign policy to the dictates of international institutions, especially the United Nations.  There is nothing morally responsible about submitting America's actions in the world to the judgment of this body.  Many of its influential members are the very tyrannies committing the atrocities the President wants to make pronouncements about.

There is an old saying about the world of nations. In that world, "the strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must." This is not a cynical principle, but a candid observation of the facts. It is an expression of moral and strategic modesty. When you are weak, you are in no position to prevent injustices in the world, even injustices to yourself. If America wants to do any good in the world, for itself or anyone else, it is paramount that we be strong. Thus in its infancy, when the United States was weak, George Washington in his famous Farewell Address looked forward to a time when America would be strong enough to have "command of its own fortunes," and when  "we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel."

Within the memory of the older generation in America, the United States became the most powerful nation on earth, and it remains so.  But this is no cause for such boastful and empty pronouncements as the President's Directive. Especially as we recklessly fritter away the strength we have acquired with such effort and good fortune.

If we might more modestly suggest what is "our core moral responsibility," to ourselves and to mankind, we would say as we did in an earlier letter: It is to succeed in our own experiment in freedom. If we can show by the enduring success of our experiment that free government can be good government, this will be the greatest benefit Americans can bestow on their fellow human beings—our own political well being will be a constant act of philanthropy. 

Americans should intervene in the world when intervening enhances the prospects of the American experiment. To commit to more than that betrays America's national security interest and our core moral responsibility to ourselves and our fellow human beings. Much better than the boastful posturing of the President's Directive are the modest words of John Quincy Adams: America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all [but]…the champion and vindicator only of her own."  If we vindicate our own freedom by securing it and using it well, it will be, as it has been from the beginning, a blessing and an inspiration to the world. It is as true today as it was when newly elected President Thomas Jefferson said it in his first inaugural: we are "the world's best hope."

Ohio Farmer

Words and Politics

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

Everyone across the political spectrum has been rightly celebrating the one grace note of the recent protracted battle in Washington over raising the debt ceiling—the moment when Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords appeared on the House floor, still recovering from her grievous wounds, to cast a vote on the climactic legislation. 

Giffords' welcome presence revived discussion of "civility" in our political life, a respectable term that had been deployed in the most uncivil way against raucous Tea Party activists in the moments after Giffords' shooting in January.  Then in the heat of the debt ceiling battle, leading journalists and office holders who have been most sanctimonious about civility called the Tea Party "terrorists." It should go without saying that civility is important to "civil society," but it should be equally noted that a high rhetorical pitch is especially endemic to democratic forms of government that put a premium on serious public argument over essential questions of justice and policy.  There is an opportunity here for the Tea Party to turn this attack on its head, and to break new rhetorical ground in Washington.

The fervency of Tea Party rhetoric about potentially tyrannical government is nothing especially new or different in American politics; nor is there anything new in critics using extreme language to attack the Tea Party's supposed extremism.  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who first fought each other with extreme bitterness and then conducted one of the most edifying correspondences between statesmen in human history, might well find the current discussion of civility in politics to be frivolous and unserious.  Jefferson's supporters charged Adams with wanting to refasten British monarchy on America, while Adams' supporters alleged that Jefferson's election would mean the importation of the French guillotine and the blood of revolutionary terror running through every American town. 

Our tender censors of political discourse would exhaust their vocabulary of outrage if faced with the harshness of public discourse at earlier periods of our history, not to mention the ways the hot tempers of political argument spilled over into actual violence.  The famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was a rare but not unheard of thing in the early years of our republic; as nastily as our politicians can speak today, at least no one has been assaulted in a Capitol chamber like Senator Charles Sumner in 1856, when Rep. Preston Brooks beat Sumner savagely with a cane in the heat of the bitter debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Nor have we seen mobs descending on newspaper offices and shooting editors as occurred in Alton, Illinois in the famous case of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837—the event which inspired the teaching of Lincoln's first great speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum the following year.

It may not simply be a lack of historical perspective, however, that has led to the current focus on civility in politics.  There is no doubt that changes in modern mass media have amplified our political discord.  In two generations we have gone from a media world of mostly print and radio to 24-hour television news and the always-on, unfiltered anarchy of the Internet.  Perhaps this may amount to a qualitative change in the effect of political rhetoric, just as the invention of movable type 500 years ago was a socially and politically disruptive mass media technology.  Like movable type and cheap books five centuries ago, our all-encompassing high tech mass media world is here to stay.  As the kids say, deal with it.

There is one aspect of political rhetoric, however, that office holders have within their power to change, and that change might help remove the sense many citizens have that our political class is remote from us.  When elected officials arrive in Washington, they very quickly pick up a way of talking that is not found in any other walk of life.  It comes in two forms.  First is the language of "comity," the way in which our senators and representatives habitually refer to their bitter political opponents as "my good friend from the great state of Colorado," and so forth.  In a few cases, this language expresses a true friendship across party lines, but it is usually a lie, and everyone watching on C-SPAN knows it is a lie. 

This language probably is an import from the British parliamentary procedure of referring to the "right honorable gentleman from Blaby," or some other specific constituency, in the House of Commons debates, but the formality of assuming honor in one's opponents is a different thing than asserting friendship where none exists.  This language of comity probably serves a useful purpose in keeping political discourse more temperate, but why not drop the pretence and use more neutral language—"the representative from New Jersey," "the senator from New Mexico," even "the honorable representative from New Jersey"?

Second, elected officials in Washington always lapse quickly into a Capitol Hill jargon that subtly reinforces some bad tendencies of modern government in ways that are almost unnoticed, but which contribute to the peoples' dislike of our political class.  Members of the House, in particular, speak of "my constituents" back home in the district.  But speaking of your fellow citizens as "constituents" abets the notion that your primary job is to pry as many goodies from Washington as you can for your "constituents." If the Tea Party caucus really wants to mark themselves out as a different kind of political force, they should think about banishing the term "constituents," and instead speak of citizens—a term which emphasizes our political equality.  (By the way, like the "right honorable gentleman" usage, this particular formulation is also an import from Britain, and it conveys the sense that our elected officials are our masters more than our representatives.)

In a similar vein, Tea Party caucus members should try not to use Capitol Hill jargon, which most members, especially new ones, adopt to convey the air of insider-sophistication.  Some of the special terms of art on Capitol Hill, like "budget reconciliation" and so forth, are unavoidable, but other phrases could benefit from Chruchill's rule of linguistic simplification.  For example, don’t speak of using an "expedited process" to consider budget issues; instead, say "fast track." Then the fact that nothing is ever fast in Congress will be revealed with some embarrassment for the process-oriented insiders.

If Tea Partiers actually speak differently as well as thinking differently, it will mark them out even more as a reforming force in Washington.  And if they do that, their critics will continue to call them names, mostly short, non-jargony names that are easy to make out.  That will be another sign of their impact.

Ohio Farmer

The Sense of the People

To the Members of the 112th Congress:

In the negotiations over increasing the national debt ceiling, one fact is so obvious it has barely been mentioned: America has a government that can be, and currently is, divided. A Democratic president and Senate majority leader sit at the table with a Republican Speaker of the House.

Were the configuration otherwise, as it was between the 2008 and 2010 elections when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and the presidency, the debt ceiling debate would probably not be taking place at all. When Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress passed an increase in the debt ceiling in 2010, Republican legislators made some critical speeches but the bill moved swiftly to President Obama's desk for signature.

The possibility of divided government inheres in a constitutional republic where both houses of a bicameral legislature and the head of the executive branch are all elected by the people, but not by the same people at the same time. As our civics textbooks teach us, each Representative is elected for two years by voters in one of the 435 congressional districts. Senators are elected every six years, state-by-state. Because those six-year terms are staggered, only one third of the Senate faces the voters in any given election, while the entire membership of the House does. Presidents are elected every four years by the entire, constitutionally organized, national electorate.

Divisions like America's could never occur in a parliamentary democracy where the people elect the entire legislature at once. The party that wins a majority forms a government, and the prime minister – a member of the legislature, as are all the cabinet members – submits legislation that his party invariably passes. Such systems have been described as "dictatorships punctuated by elections."

More than a century ago, the American Progressives began their historic assault on our constitutional system, yearning for the clarity and dispatch of a parliamentary system. Woodrow Wilson, for example, sought sweeping reforms that would "make self-government among us a straightforward thing of simple method, single, unstinted power, and clear responsibility." H.L. Mencken, Wilson's contemporary, offered a less celebratory expression of the same idea: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

One strand of the political philosophy woven into the Constitution is that sometimes the people don't know what they want, and other times they think they do, only to wind up regretting their "settled" opinions after some reassessment. The Constitution's authors believed, as one of them stated in Federalist 63, that "where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies [such as the House and Senate] is required in every public act," the republic is best prepared to navigate "particular moments in public affairs when the people . . . may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn." The objective, as we have had several occasions to observe in these letters, is that "the cool and deliberate sense of the community" will "ultimately prevail."

Each party would clearly prefer to deal with the debt ceiling, and the nation's long-term fiscal problems, on its own terms, with both houses of Congress and the presidency under its control. If the Democrats had their way, that would mean higher taxes, especially on the rich; more borrowing, especially until the unemployment rate is much lower; and few spending cuts, especially from domestic programs. If Republicans controlled both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they would emphasize spending cuts, especially to domestic programs; less borrowing; tax reforms to apply lower, simpler tax rates to a broader, more vigorous tax base; and regulatory reforms to stimulate economic growth.

Which approach best reflects "the will of the people"? That may be a question that doesn't, at least for the moment, really have an answer. It's not as though either party's philosophy has been hidden over the past years, or undergone profound changes. The voters knew what they were getting when they gave Republicans control over all the federal elected branches from 2002 to 2006, and then when they disliked the results, and chose to check a Republican president with a Democratic House and Senate. The voters knew, or should have known, what they were getting when they empowered Democrats to run everything in 2008, and then again two years later when they decided to return the Republicans to a majority in the House to curtail the Democrats' policy-making latitude.

It would be fair to say, in other words, that the electorate has serious misgivings about both the Democrats' "big government" approach and the Republicans' "limited government" one. After signing up for either, the people quickly succumb to buyer's remorse and avail themselves of the opportunity to weaken or impede the "mandate" they conferred an election or two ago.

Americans didn't used to hedge their political bets this way. From 1900 to 1980 the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives were controlled by the same party for a total of 56 years, 70% of the time. Those 56 years included 14 consecutive years of Democratic control, from 1932 to 1946, when the New Deal was launched, and eight more from 1960 to 1968, which saw the beginning of the Great Society.

By the time the ballots from the 2012 election are counted, the same party will have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for only 8 of the preceding 32 years, or 25% of the time. This new era, in which divided government is the rule rather than the exception, was ushered in by the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, and GOP victories that gave the party its first Senate majority since 1954.

It's hard to believe that these two developments – the emergence of a credible conservative opposition to the governmental activism promoted by FDR and LBJ, and the beginning of a long era in which partisan majorities are rare and transient – are coincidental. Roosevelt and Johnson spoke to and for an American majority that liked the benefactions big government bestowed. Reagan spoke to and for a majority grown skeptical about the taxes, borrowing, and regulatory intrusions big government required.

That skepticism was sufficient to slow the growth of big government, but not to dismantle the New Deal/Great Society. For the past thirty-one years the American people have straddled an untenable position: voting in favor of most of what big government does, but against most of what big government requires. The debate in Washington over the debt ceiling is an echo of the debate, across America, over the proper scope and cost of government, a debate that seeks a resolution it has not yet found. The cool and deliberate sense of the national community will ultimately prevail, but it must first settle on one or the other of two alternatives that are fundamentally opposed.

Ohio Farmer