Dangerous Games
The debt limit is supposed to make Congress think twice before passing tax cuts or spending increases that add to the national debt. Instead, lawmakers routinely support policies without paying for them — like the Bush-era tax cuts and two wars — and then posture and protest when their decisions require raising the debt limit.
So it will be once Congress returns from its spring recess. The debt limit — $14.3 trillion — will be hit as early as mid-May. If it is not raised in time, the government will have to use increasingly unorthodox tactics to meet its obligations, which would disrupt the financial markets and the economic recovery.
Default is theoretically possible, though public outrage over the mess would likely compel Congress to raise the debt limit before then. The best approach, the most sensible and mature, would be to pass a clean and timely increase.
However, nothing sensible or mature is on the horizon. Republicans have vowed to extract more heedless spending cuts in exchange for their votes to raise the debt limit. To that end, they seem likely to demand changes to the budget process, like a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, or spending caps.
Such reforms have a glib appeal — who can oppose something as prudent-sounding as balanced budgets? In fact, they are a dodge, because they cut spending broadly without lawmakers having to defend specific cuts. They are also often wired to block tax increases, without which deficit reduction efforts are not only unfair, but also will not succeed.
Take, for example, the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that Senate Republicans recently endorsed. By rigidly requiring a balanced budget each year, it would deepen recessions by forcing tax increases or spending cuts in a weak economy.
Worse, the amendment would hold annual spending to 18 percent of the previous year’s gross domestic product, a formula that works out to about 16.7 percent in the proposal’s early years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That is a level last seen in 1956 — a time before Medicare, before the interstate highways, when many baby boomers were not yet born, never mind aging into retirement.
Sharply lower spending would, in turn, allow for big tax cuts. Those tax cuts would be virtually irreversible, since the amendment calls for a two-thirds vote of both houses to raise taxes.
Another bad idea is the spending cap proposed by two senators, Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, and Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. It would cap spending at around 21 percent of G.D.P., compared with about 24 percent now — which would require deep cuts like those in the House Republican budget plan. With its emphasis on spending cuts, the cap also seems intended to reduce the deficit without tax increases.
In the successful deficit reduction efforts of 1990 and 1993, budget process reforms were helpful. The key, however, was to first enact credible deficit-reduction packages — with spending cuts and tax increases — and then impose rules, like pay-as-you-go, to prevent backsliding. Process reforms alone avoid the hard work. Still, they can exert powerful political pull.
The White House and Congressional Democrats must not allow themselves to be taken hostage again.
So it will be once Congress returns from its spring recess. The debt limit — $14.3 trillion — will be hit as early as mid-May. If it is not raised in time, the government will have to use increasingly unorthodox tactics to meet its obligations, which would disrupt the financial markets and the economic recovery.
Default is theoretically possible, though public outrage over the mess would likely compel Congress to raise the debt limit before then. The best approach, the most sensible and mature, would be to pass a clean and timely increase.
However, nothing sensible or mature is on the horizon. Republicans have vowed to extract more heedless spending cuts in exchange for their votes to raise the debt limit. To that end, they seem likely to demand changes to the budget process, like a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, or spending caps.
Such reforms have a glib appeal — who can oppose something as prudent-sounding as balanced budgets? In fact, they are a dodge, because they cut spending broadly without lawmakers having to defend specific cuts. They are also often wired to block tax increases, without which deficit reduction efforts are not only unfair, but also will not succeed.
Take, for example, the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution that Senate Republicans recently endorsed. By rigidly requiring a balanced budget each year, it would deepen recessions by forcing tax increases or spending cuts in a weak economy.
Worse, the amendment would hold annual spending to 18 percent of the previous year’s gross domestic product, a formula that works out to about 16.7 percent in the proposal’s early years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That is a level last seen in 1956 — a time before Medicare, before the interstate highways, when many baby boomers were not yet born, never mind aging into retirement.
Sharply lower spending would, in turn, allow for big tax cuts. Those tax cuts would be virtually irreversible, since the amendment calls for a two-thirds vote of both houses to raise taxes.
Another bad idea is the spending cap proposed by two senators, Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, and Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. It would cap spending at around 21 percent of G.D.P., compared with about 24 percent now — which would require deep cuts like those in the House Republican budget plan. With its emphasis on spending cuts, the cap also seems intended to reduce the deficit without tax increases.
In the successful deficit reduction efforts of 1990 and 1993, budget process reforms were helpful. The key, however, was to first enact credible deficit-reduction packages — with spending cuts and tax increases — and then impose rules, like pay-as-you-go, to prevent backsliding. Process reforms alone avoid the hard work. Still, they can exert powerful political pull.
The White House and Congressional Democrats must not allow themselves to be taken hostage again.
Shielding the Privacies of Life
The Supreme Court has never heard a case challenging the government’s authority to search a computer. It is time, after a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit opened the way last month to vast government intrusion. It ruled that, without good reason to suspect evidence of a crime, border agents could seize a laptop and open a dragnet search of files, e-mails and Web sites visited.
The majority pats itself on the back for stopping “far short of ‘anything goes’ at the border,” since any intrusion must not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But by not requiring the government to have a reason for seizing a computer or to say what it is searching for, a dissent notes, the majority “allows the government to set its own limits.” In other words, pretty much anything goes.
The government asked the court to create this precedent, though in this case it had genuine grounds for suspicion. When the defendant crossed from Mexico into Arizona, his criminal record as a child molester came up in a database. When the government looked for child pornography, it found plenty on his laptop. The government has a duty to secure the borders against this and other kinds of illegal material, including drugs and weapons.
Fourth Amendment law already gives border agents huge leeway, allowing them to search travelers and their belongings, without a warrant, proof of probable cause or suspicion of illegal activity. The Ninth Circuit decided that computers could be searched on site as part of those belongings. But this ruling allows the government to hold a laptop for weeks or even months, transport it away from the border and subject it to an intensive search.
The difference between the search of a briefcase’s physical space and a laptop’s cyberspace — a window into the user’s mind — is profound. As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, the Fourth Amendment must protect just such “privacies of life.” It was 1928 when he warned that “ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences.”
Searching a computer is a major invasion of privacy — one that may be necessary to protect the country’s security. But there still must be limits and protections. It is now up to the Supreme Court to establish those limits.
Democrats and Gun Control
Months after Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, Terry McAuliffe, then the Democratic Party chief, urged Democrats to steer clear of gun control, warning of the “devastating impact on elections” wrought by the gun lobby’s monied campaign attacks. Far too many Democratic politicians have since followed that cynical doctrine. The gun lobby’s power has only grown while 30,000 Americans die each year by gun violence.
So it is heartening to hear an unwavering call for stronger controls from Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the incoming chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. At a rally Monday for Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Ms. Wasserman Schultz spoke out for legislation to close the loophole — she called it “outrageous” — that allows gun-show customers, whether felons, terrorists or the deranged, to avoid background checks.
The Florida congresswoman was not officially speaking for the party, but she hardly trimmed her sails in anticipation of her national role. She called as well for improving the information available to law enforcement about people with histories of mental illness.
Four years after a mentally troubled gunman massacred 32 people at Virginia Tech, and months after the Tucson rampage, the federal database created to track risky gun buyers is waiting for full cooperation from state officials. Congress should bolster and adequately finance this needed resource. And it should ban sports outlets from selling the banana-magazines of ammunition used in Tucson that were designed for soldiers, not hunters.
The Tucson shootings finally forced President Obama to break his silence and call for “comprehensive and consistent” background checks on buyers. Ms. Wasserman Schultz has shown real leadership in rejecting the McAuliffe doctrine. Mr. Obama needs to join her.
Senator Ensign May Go, but the Questions Remain
Senator John Ensign abruptly announced his resignation on Thursday night, hoping to head-off a public airing of the ethics investigation into sordid misdeeds that destroyed his political future.Related
Far from pronouncing the case closed, however, the Senate Ethics Committee owes the public a full report on its 22-month inquiry into how Mr. Ensign boosted the lobbying career of a former top aide — after the aide discovered the senator had had an affair with the aide’s wife. The Nevada Republican, who had already announced he wasn’t running for re-election, stepped down as reports suggested the ethics panel was on the verge of formal charges of wrongdoing.
Of critical importance is whether a $96,000 payment to the aggrieved aide, Douglas Hampton, was hush money, and whether Mr. Ensign’s admitted support for Mr. Hampton’s lobbying clients violated the Senate’s quid-pro-quo strictures. These are serious ethics questions that will reflect badly on the Senate if the resignation is used as an excuse to conclude in official silence.
Mr. Ensign, a family values conservative, confirmed the affair when Mr. Hampton went to the news media. But the senator denied any ethics violations, insisting that the $96,000 was a simple gift from his parents to Mr. Hampton and that he used his office to help two of Mr. Hampton’s lobbying clients on merit, not because they were crucial to keeping his old aide employed.
In a separate criminal investigation, Mr. Hampton is facing charges for allegedly lobbying his old boss sooner than the one-year limit mandated after he quit. Senator Ensign’s lawyers claim he is clear of the criminal investigation, but the Justice Department has been silent.
All the unanswered questions require the ethics panel to issue a full disclosure of its findings. Mr. Ensign’s retreat does not mean that the Senate can duck its own responsibility to the American people.
Of critical importance is whether a $96,000 payment to the aggrieved aide, Douglas Hampton, was hush money, and whether Mr. Ensign’s admitted support for Mr. Hampton’s lobbying clients violated the Senate’s quid-pro-quo strictures. These are serious ethics questions that will reflect badly on the Senate if the resignation is used as an excuse to conclude in official silence.
Mr. Ensign, a family values conservative, confirmed the affair when Mr. Hampton went to the news media. But the senator denied any ethics violations, insisting that the $96,000 was a simple gift from his parents to Mr. Hampton and that he used his office to help two of Mr. Hampton’s lobbying clients on merit, not because they were crucial to keeping his old aide employed.
In a separate criminal investigation, Mr. Hampton is facing charges for allegedly lobbying his old boss sooner than the one-year limit mandated after he quit. Senator Ensign’s lawyers claim he is clear of the criminal investigation, but the Justice Department has been silent.
All the unanswered questions require the ethics panel to issue a full disclosure of its findings. Mr. Ensign’s retreat does not mean that the Senate can duck its own responsibility to the American people.
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