president – Hank Kalet

So much for the separation of powers

Newt Gingrich is calling for federal judges to explain their decisions to Congress — a move that clearly violates the Constitution and would compromise the independence of the federal bench. Gingrich, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, told the reporters today that his background as a historian he “may understand this better than lawyers.”

I know liberals view a Gingrich nomination as good for the president’s chances for re-election, but it is far too dangerous to allow such an extremist to get that close to the White House.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Comment live on the Christie announcement

Live Coverage of Christie’s Announcement

Patch has opened its live blog to take the pulse of New Jersey on Gov. Chris Christie’s apparent decision not to run for president.

Join us here, on my blog, or go to one of our Central Jersey sites: princeton.patch.com, southbrunswick.patch.com, newbrunswick.patch.com, lawrenceville.patch.com, eastwindsor.patch.com or eastbrunswick.patch.com.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Manufactured crisis v. real crisis

The American government is barrelling foward into an abyss in which the nation’s credit-worthiness will be called into question and its economic well-being badly damaged.

And yet, the crisis we face is one created in Washington having little to do with the way our economy functions.

The federal government — specifically, the president and the two houses of Congress — has until next week to raise the national debt ceiling or face the shutdown of government programs, the inability to send out government checks and default on some of our debt.

The crisis is real, if contrived, and the solution is actually rather simple: eliminate the debt ceiling. The ceiling, as The New York Times points out in a useful Q&A today, is a relic of an earlier time:

The system goes back to World War I, when Congress first put a limit on federal debt. The limit was part of a law that allowed the Treasury to issue Liberty Bonds to help pay for the war. The law was intended to give the Treasury greater discretion over borrowing by eliminating the need for Congress to approve each new issuance of debt. Over the years the limit has been raised repeatedly, to $14.3 trillion today from roughly $43 billion in 1940. But outside observers have noted that the failure to make increases in the debt limit part of the regular budget process can be risky. The G.A.O. concluded that it would be better if “decisions about the debt level occur in conjunction with spending and revenue decisions as opposed to the after-the-fact approach now used,” adding that doing so “would help avoid the uncertainty and disruptions that occur during debates on the debt limit today.”

It is an arbitrary limit that treats all debt the same way and strips legislators of their responsibility to consider the long-term implications of their budgeting decisions. Removing our multiple wars from the budget, as was done by President George W. Bush, makes it seem as though the budget is responsible, that we have the revenues to pay for what we want to spend. But the billions that are being tossed down the rabbit hole of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and Pakistan and Libya and South America) come from somewhere. So we borrow.

The same goes for the Bush tax cuts, which were described by the president at the time as stimulative to the economy and, therefore, a revenue generator. The absurdity of the claim was obvious at the time, and has only grown more ridiculous as time has passed.

So, what might we consider good debt? Spending on roads and bridges, for instance, because the result is something with a long shelf life. Basically, you are paying off the use of the roads, bridges, solar grids, rail lines, etc., over the length of their lives. And, this is a philosphical point, you are asking future generations to contribute to the cost of infrastructure that they will be using.

Education would fall under good debt, because it adds value to the workforce (I hate looking at education in this way, but from a budget and debt standpoint, I think we have to). The same goes for R&D and weatherization programs, upgrades to public housing and affordable housing, environmental enforcement (because it maintains a long-term societal good), and so on.

The issue is not debt, but the kind of debt we are dealing with (we have reached a point where we are borrowing to pay off previous debt, a problem that will not be aided by a failure to raise the debt ceiling). And it is a problem with revenue — let the Bush-era tax cuts expire on everyone.

Revenue, of course, is the key issue here. Beyond the Bush tax cuts, we face a serious drop-off in revenue caused by the recession. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and about one in six Americans either unemployed or underemployed, by most estimates, the amount that the middle class can contribute to the federal budget is in decline. The only way to address this is to put Americans back to work. And the only way to do this is for the federal government — i.e., the entity empowed by the American people to act on their behalf — to step in with public works projects, aid to states (to avert public worker layoffs), etc.

And we should eliminate the debt ceiling and leave it to the market to determine whether the United States is a creditable risk.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

So much for the great liberal hope. Again.

There are only two explanations for what Barack Obama said this week about the Supreme Court: He believes that the court — and not just the current, rightwing incarnation, but the liberal court of the ’60s and ’70s — has been too activist in its approach, or he is attempting to defang the right as he moves to replace Justice John Paul Stevens.

Here is what he said on Air Force One on Wednesday about the court (I saw this initially on Glen Greenwald’s blog, but the quote is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution):

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I mean, here’s what I will say. It used to be that the notion of an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically. And in the ’60s and ’70s, the feeling was, is that liberals were guilty of that kind of approach.

What you’re now seeing, I think, is a conservative jurisprudence that oftentimes makes the same error. And I think rather than a notion of judicial restraint we should apply both to liberals and conservative jurists, what you’re seeing is arguments about original intent and other legal theories that end up giving judges an awful lot of power; in fact, sometimes more power than duly-elected representatives.

And so I’m not looking at this particular judicial nomination through that prism alone, but I think it is important for us to understand that judicial — the concept of judicial restraint cuts both ways. And the core understanding of judicial restraint is, is that generally speaking, we should presume that the democratic processes and laws that are produced by the House and the Senate and state legislatures, et cetera, that the administrative process that goes with it is afforded some deference as long as core constitutional values are observed.

Liberals need to read these comments closely. The president appears to be endorsing a very narrow view of the judiciary’s role, though it is possible he just chose his words without the requisite care. In any case, as Greenwald points out, the president should have been asked to explain what he meant and to offer examples of the kind of overreach he seems to be criticizing.

For liberals, this is important because the decisions made by the court in the 1960s and 1970s “form the bedrock of progressive legal thought regarding the Constitution and the Supreme Court,” and his comments are consistent with other cases in which he made a “typical effort to show how fair-minded he is by attacking the Dreaded Left.”

I’ve pointed this out before. Going after one’s base is foolish, but it is tried-and-true extablishment liberalism that dates back to the Clinton years, the willingness to sacrifice political principles to maintain some sort of legislative, electoral or public relations advantage. And it is something the president has proven himself adept at doing.

The problem, of course, is that doing so undercuts the very people who helped put him in office, which only contributes to the mix of apathy and anger out there that is moving us inexorably toward a political implosion. The scales used to address the big issues have been weighed down by a conservative thumb.

But that in and of itself is not the only criteria by which I’m making selections on judges.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Putting his foot down?

I’m watching the Rachel Maddow Show and listening to Seymour Hersh talk about the AP report that President Obama has rejected all Afghanistan war options currently on the table. Hersh says the president has finally put his foot down, after having given the generals carte blanch to create a plan — which meant big war plans were likely to be pushed.

The AP report says that the “main sticking points appear to be timelines and mounting questions about the credibility of the Afghan government” and that the president “wants to make clear that the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan is not open-ended.”

This is better news than I — and many others who oppose an expanded war and who want the U.S. to scale back its military presence — expected. But it is not enough.

We continue to approach the Afghanistan question with an imperial mindset, one that starts with war and ends with war and dismisses any options that do not involve war. We’re not deaf to other possibilities, but actively and aggressively dismissive — including to complaints by the people on the ground we say we’re trying to help.

And in doing so, we ensure that the rest of the world distrusts us.