I'll try to keep this sufficiently sexy to keep your attention.
After all, our default setting this time is "whatever":
The attention paid to the debt ceiling crisis in the Obama era may have been a product of a simpler political time, when a near-existential threat to the nation was an anomaly, not another Thursday. Donald Trump was a reality TV show host, social media was still a novelty and a congressman yelling “you lie” at the president seemed like a really big deal.
“We all have shorter attention spans and crisis fatigue,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who was a top communications official in the Obama White House during those earlier fights.
Like Marvel Studios struggling to keep audiences engaged after they’ve seen the universe saved from the brink of destruction 32 times, a partisan congressional fight just doesn’t have the same draw, however grave the stakes.
“Because default was avoided the last two times, there seems to be an assumption from a lot of people and the markets that it will be avoided again,” Pfeiffer said. “That is a deeply naive view in my opinion.”
Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute implores us to look at the world-stage implications of our current juncture:
The corrosion of norms and the lack of seriousness in Washington could unleash an economic disaster. This would follow on the heels of the January 6, 2021, insurrection and all that surrounded it – the first time in American history that a president tried to use his office to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after losing an election.
Foreign leaders and global investors would look at the US and see a damning portrait. In this broken system, many elected officials do not respect the results of a presidential election and permit policy and ideological differences to stand in the way of honoring the government’s financial obligations. Investors would think harder about allocating capital to US entities, and America’s role as a beacon of liberal values – including free markets – would be severely undermined.
To whom would the world then turn? There is no obvious candidate. But the absence of a better alternative is a thin reed for national greatness and global economic and political leadership. Sooner or later, it will be gone.
The cyclical nature of these looming debt crises stems from the early twentieth century collective consensus that we needed to reconsider the nature and scope of the American federal government. The wave of fin de siecle progressive thinkers - Richard T. Ely, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson - posited that, with the onset of urbanization, industrialization, and an even population spread across the continent, American life had become too complex for the Constitution to adequately address it.
Closely following on their heels was the wave of muckraking journalists and socially focused novelists who pointed up the upheaval wrought by these changes.
And then came FDR's brain trust, particularly Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins.
But few were the voices that cautioned hesitation about using government, the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as the means by which we'd adjust. So once the leviathan began to grow, there was no stopping it.:
I think the story of President Madison's last veto is instructive on several levels, including moral. Hang in there with this account. It looks like it's headed for a dismaying ending, but all turns out well:
In 1796, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison, in part questioning whether Congress’s enumerated constitutional authority to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” empowered the legislature to “make the roads, or only select from those already made, those on which there shall be a post” (emphasis in original). Weighing the constitutionality, efficiency, and economic wisdom of the two options, Jefferson chose the latter, preferring to keep Congress out of the business of “cutting down mountains & bridging . . . rivers.” Madison, however, would apparently struggle with the question of the federal government’s authority to build roads, culminating in one of the most dramatic (and inspiring) final acts in presidential history.
Almost twenty years after receiving Jefferson’s letter, President Madison had his eye on “internal improvements,” or infrastructure. In the aftermath of the War of 1812 and in the last years of his presidency, Madison felt compelled to introduce a more efficient system of roads for trade, transport, and communication, and he believed the federal government was suited for the task.
In his 1815 State of the Union address, Madison highlighted “the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority.” Madison touted the many advantages he perceived in such a system—economic, utilitarian, patriotic, and artistic—before reiterating that while states had their own local roads and quaint canals, the federal government was the best choice for “systematically completing so inestimable a work” on a national scale. But did Congress have the authority to establish such a system? Somehow, the father of the Constitution seemed unconcerned, as “any defect of constitutional authority which may be encountered can be supplied in a mode which the Constitution itself has providently pointed out.” In other words, if it’s illegal, we’ll make it legal.
In his final State of the Union address, Madison doubled down on his desires for a national infrastructure package, calling on Congress “to effectuate a comprehensive system of roads and canals.” As to the constitutionality of his plan, Madison again charged Congress to get the job done by hook or by crook, emphasizing “the expediency of exercising their existing powers, and, where necessary, of resorting to the prescribed mode of enlarging them.”
Inspired by Madison’s remarks, young Congressman John C. Calhoun introduced the Bonus Bill of 1817, a provision designed to earmark certain revenue for “a permanent fund for internal improvement” in order to “bind the Republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.” Such a bill seemed a perfect fit for what the president had requested only a few weeks earlier, and Speaker of the House Henry Clay joined Calhoun to push the legislation forward in the waning days of Madison’s term. Amid concerns of federalism, Congress even shored up the Bonus Bill with two amendments designed to place more power in the hands of the states than previously intended. The bill passed by the narrowest of margins in the House and fared only slightly better in the Senate, but it landed on James Madison’s desk in the final week of his administration, seemingly in the nick of time.
When Representative Calhoun and other Republican congressmen visited President Madison on his penultimate day in office to say goodbye, however, Madison privately told Calhoun that he had had a change of heart and would be vetoing the Bonus Bill. A dumbstruck Calhoun informed Speaker Clay, who wrote Madison and begged him to at least leave the bill for his successor, James Monroe. But Madison would not.
In his veto message to the House of Representatives, penned on his final day in office as his last official act as president, James Madison returned to familiar form:
“The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation within the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.”
Vetoing the exact measures he had called for, Madison explained that he could not find “a power to construct roads and canals, and to improve the navigation of water courses” in the Commerce Clause, and he especially rejected appeals to the Preamble’s mission “to provide for the common defense and general welfare” as justification for such congressional power, as this interpretation would give Congress “a general power of legislation” and render “the special and careful enumeration of powers” in the Constitution “nugatory and improper.”
As he concluded, Madison echoed the policy views he had expressed in his 1815 pronouncement by first noting that he was “not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses.” But Madison was able to separate that enduring political view from his legal view that “such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and . . . no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill,” so he had “no option but to withhold [his] signature from it.”
He remembered what he was really about as a statesman. Just in time to stave off the leviathan for a century.
We've been asking things of government way beyond what Madison envisioned its function to be.
That's led to a collective cognitive dissonance that increasingly affects all areas of our lives.
Is it too late to shake the assumptions we've been amassing for decades?
I'm gonna leave this with that question, which ought to be the primary conversation among us as engaged citizens.
Oh, wait. Are we still engaged citizens?
Another conversation we ought to be having!
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