220. Congress: Debt Ceilings and Term Limits

What does the debt ceiling, due to screw up national decision-making again on October 17, have in common with the two-term limit on the service of our presidents?  Both are cases of the ignorant tying the hands of the knowing.

People living in the past are always going to know less about the needs of the nation in the future than the people living in that future.  The men of 1789 knew very little about what the U. S. would need in the way of a President in 1940.  The people of 1917 didn't know a damn thing about the expenditures needed in 2013.  Hell, nobody in the world could, even a year ahead of time, tell what the nation was going to need in 2013.

Yes, there is a difference between those people.  The men of 1789, however willing they were to bind men of the future in other ways, refused to bind them in this way.  They left it to the choice of the men on the spot at the time.  Washington declined a third term, and established a custom; Roosevelt went for a third term, and broke the custom.  Then the people of the time could make their choice.  Binding by law didn't come until 1951.

The men of 1917, on the other hand, were not only willing to bind men of the future to what they thought best for them, they were willing to give men of any party the ability to bind all the men who came after them, at any distance — decades, years, months — to what they thought best for them.  I know, the men of 1917 did this by accident, and it took the men and women of 1995 (the new Republican Congress), to do it by intent, but still it was done.  Both oppose the democratic notion that people, by majority vote, should be free to determine what's best for them.

Where do knowledge and ignorance come in?  In the claim that justifies such apparently undemocratic action: we're smarter people.  There's nothing new there.  All people in parties think they're smarter than people in other parties.  But these people, or whoever put the binding into law, were saying that they were smarter than everybody, including those who might come along later.  "We know the nation's needs at that time better than they will know them."  No, it's worse than that.  It's the howler, "We know the nation's needs better than we ourselves will know them."  In the case of the debt ceiling they will be referring to the on-the-spot measures they will have knowledgably passed, or let pass, but which still, maybe a week later, have to be funded.  They assert, practically simultaneously, A and not-A.

I think we can bear the arrogance here — "Since we are smarter than all the dumb bunnies who follow us, we'll fix it so that they'll have to recognize our wisdom" — but I'm not sure we can bear the stupidity.  How smart do you have to be to recognize that people facing a problem are going to know more about it than people guessing at it from the past? 

No, you can't argue that that's what our Founding Fathers believed.  "Didn't those fathers see the need to protect dumb bunnies from themselves?  And aren't we all dumb bunnies?" Of course we are, and they devised a Constitution to protect us from ourselves, binding us.  But none of those bindings, like the one to keep us from uniting church and state, are like these, binding one set of Congressmen (or voters) to another, earlier set, on the grounds that the later set will be less wise in the choice of a candidate or budget.  And you can't argue that the Athenians, our models, did that, by setting limits.  They did, but only for offices chosen by lot.  For the rest they trusted elections.

"Yes, but there's nothing in our Constitution to protect dumb-bunny voters from the demagogue who learns how to make his position permanent, or from spendthrift Congressmen who break the bank." 

That's just wrong.  Elections are specified in the Constitution and they protect us.  But that appeal to the Constitution, like so many others, is beside the point.  It's not that debt- and term-limit setters are saying that voters are dumb bunnies; it's that they're saying that some bunnies are less dumb than others, and that's them.  With no basis whatsoever.

Where did they get the idea that future voters could not identify a three-term-hungry demagogue (or a bank-breaking Congressman) but that they could?  The idea that future voters couldn't throw him out with an election but that he had to be thrown out by a law?  If they were so smart why didn't they see that along with the bad demagogue they were going to throw out all the bright, good, non-demagogic nation-savers that might be there in the same bathwater.   I think they got their idea of future incompetence from the conviction that they themselves were the nation-savers.  They couldn't wait for history to bestow that title.

Oh how a democracy needs that, ability to wait.  Leaders who wait for history, citizens who wait for an election.  It's the ability Egyptians so needed if they were to have a democracy, ability to bear the Muslims in power long enough to meet the requirement that they throw them out in an election.  No, they saw nation-destroyers, and needed nation-savers.  And got what Thomas Jefferson could have predicted, a tyrant, one who, like all tyrants and demagogues, sells himself as a nation-saver.

Well, nation-saving is as nation-saving does, and maybe Egypt needed such saving.  Maybe we can come up with a justification of General el-Sisi, and maybe we can justify our democracy in supporting him.  It's hard but it probably can be done.  Worse things can happen to a country than loss of democracy, I suppose.  But of all the kinds of saving we try to justify I think the saving of our nation from its dumb bunnies by another set of dumb bunnies must surely be the hardest.