Dear Mr. President:

Recently, a plan came before Congress to "stimulate" the United States economy by spending some $900 bn. During his campaign, President Obama promise to deliver such a stimulus.
There was recently a plan before Congress to “stimulate” the United States economy by spending some $900 bn. President Obama promised during his campaign to deliver such a stimulus. He has the majority necessary in Congress to do so. However, during his campaign, Obama also railed against the divisive, partisan politics of the previous administration. He promised to work with Democrats and Republicans alike to deliver the best possible solution, even though such work is not technically necessary.

Unfortunately, all the House Republicans voted against his stimulus package, despite after Obama’s efforts to charmingly woo them into supporting him. And[,] now that members of the Senate have tried to temper such fiscal action, the President has lost “the conciliatory rhetoric and gentle wooing of the GOP” since his hoped-for stimulus is now “acing a rockier path than he’d hoped” (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18484.html). President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Senator Reid have all urged emphatically for quick passage of this massive spending bill, chastising Republican opposition.

The Republican party is now the minority. One purpose of equal minority political rights in Congress is to hold the majority party accountable for its policies. They have done so. Another job of the minority is to offer alternative solutions. The cuts proposed in the Senate are thought-out, articulated, and justifiable, seeking to save present and future American taxpayers money. But Obama and Pelosi have conveyed a certain disdain for such Opposition activities. The BBC has reported that “US President Barack Obama has said the Senate's delay in passing his $900bn (£616bn) economic stimulus package is ‘inexcusable and irresponsible’” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7875520.stm).

Throughout his campaign, Obama had me believing that, if elected, he would bring a kind of systematic change to the way in which politics are executed. Minorities would be collaborated with, not hushed up, and there would be serious debate about what needed to be done. This sort of change, I now believe, is unlikely to materialize. The President will continue to pressure Congress to go along with his plans. In order to appease the President, Congressional majority leaders will quiet any dissent (remember, attempts to delay this bill have been labeled as “inexcusable and irresponsible”). While the fate of this bill is important to me, ultimately I care about the preservation of our Constitutional political process more.

In the oath of office the President makes, he pledges to “preserve, protect[,] and defend the Constitution of the United States.” This includes showing respect for the legislative and deliberative process. It is the job of the Executive to enforce the laws he is given by Congress. In bullying the legislature into enacting his bills, the President is violating the careful system of checks and balances which the Framers established. In a Presidential system, the executive is strong, in that once policy has been decided--I might emphatically add “by the legislature,” he can see it carried out. Until that time, he must wait.

The reason we have this system goes back to the Revolutionary War. In Britain, the executives are chosen from among the majority party in Parliament. The various Ministers, so long as party discipline (and therefore partisanship) is enforced, may enact whatever policy they please. This is obviously a problem. The reason we have two Houses in Congress and separate elections for the Executive and Legislative branches of government is so that careful deliberation goes into the correctness of prospective laws. Yet throughout the present administration, the stimulus package has been deemed indisputably necessary, and it is said that any pause to debate the ideas’ soundness and prudence would cause further catastrophe and economic hurt.

What about political hurt? Tens of thousands of men have given their lives for our political liberties. The Constitution says little about governance of economic affairs. The President, Congress, and Supreme Court are first charged with defending the political freedom of American citizens. It is widely accepted that leadership is best exemplified by example. But if the Congress is not willing to be an ideal forum for discussion, are the American people going to continue their oversight of the government? They probably will not. Our democratic ideals require an energetic, educated, involved electorate.

There are many instances in history when lack of deliberation caused disaster. In 1930s Britain, the Chamberlain government stifled Tory debate regarding appeasement and rearmament. The government did nothing to deter Hitler’s buildup and subsequent wars. The British sacrificed Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to their inability to combat their real enemy. By the time Parliamentary leadership actually did open up for debate, the Second World War had begun, and the British would become hard pressed to win without American intercession. France would be overrun. Tens of thousands would perish in a struggle which could have been averted through upholding of democratic principles of opposition and debate.

I submit to you that President Obama cannot have both a lack of debate and bipartisanship at the same time. There are key differences between Republican and Democrat. For the Republicans to agree every time without being convinced by solidly logical rhetoric—not the fear-inspiring scare tactics Obama once condemned and now uses—and viable historical example in open debate would be for them to betray their ideals and to betray the American people of what Walter Lippmann termed the Indispensable Opposition.

The United States Senate has been called the world’s greatest deliberative body. Let them deliberate.

In 1653, Oliver Cromwell told England’s Long Parliament, “Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!”


Sincerely,



Michael Belding III

I cannot agree more: "The other factor at play here, which Democratic ears seem unable to detect, is that Obama is skillfully turning the meaning of the word "bipartisan" into "the coalition that agrees with my magnanimous self." All this "political suicide" talk serves his conscious goal of peeling off enough scared and/or squishy Republicans to turn his already impressive majority into something positively Reaganesque. So that he can even more smoothly carry out the urgent bipartisan business of installing Big Labor in the West Wing."

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131367.html?success=1#lastpost

In the past hundred or so years, the middle class in the United States has grown massively.  Along with this trend has come large land ownership, where people own their own houses.  To do so, they have to take out large loans and pay them back over decades.  There is a mortgage securities crisis going on now, and it is mostly because of bad policy by the Federal Reserve and other banks, and because people took out massive loans for houses they could not afford.  So, they defaulted on their loans. 

Normally, while this is a bad situation, it would not be entirely catastrophic.  Unfortunately, over the past several years, home values have become rather high and so now, in a cooling market, the potential prices of the homes owned by foreclosed individuals (or people who simply want to move before they’ve paid off their mortgage) is much less than the balance of their loan.  When they sell their home, then, they cannot entirely pay off the loan for a house they no longer possess.  This is where the situation gets a little tricky, and starts to spell definitively bad news. 

If we look back into history, we see this sort of thing happen in the short selling of stocks.  Short sellers borrow shares and sell them while the stock price is high.  They then wait until the stock price is low to buy back the shares to return to the lender, pocketing the difference as profit.  The greater the difference between the selling price and the buyback price, the greater profit will be.  However, savvy financiers (in the 1870s and 1880s, people such as Jay Gould) can manipulate the stock markets to cause chaos and spur the short sellers into buying back their stock at a loss. 

This is sort of the situation we have today.  The middle class is trying to unload what are widely thought of as bad assets, without staying put (literally, in this sense, since it is when people have to move out of and sell their homes that they come into this kind of trouble) and waiting for the storm to pass. 

            I’m sure nobody will disagree with me when I say that government should be accountable to the citizens.  We should know what’s going on; we should know what they’re doing.  I’m also sure people will agree that it’s very important to have open debate about government policy.  Equally important are constitutional checks on the power of the majority, so this openness and discussion—limitations on the power and scope of government, really—can be attained and preserved. 

 

            Being a rather vocal conservative, I tend to get into altercations with liberals.  Myself being a one-time liberal, and almost everywhere else on the politico-philosophical spectrum, it’s fairly easy for me to appreciate their views, know where they’re coming from, and what they mean.  However, having changed my views, it is also difficult to have patience when I start shooting my rhetorical guns, as it were.  The liberals I tend to debate—and even the conservatives—are, like myself, convinced of their own correctness.  This leads to them (I think) stubbornly clinging to their views even when I’ve debunked them easily, swiftly, and unanswerably (by them).  And when I say it how it is and they don’t have a counter, they invoke the Heartless Conservative stereotype.  I’m heartless insofar as I defend my position with the best arguments I have, even though it’s possible such a defense may lead to my verbal victory.  Should I lessen the caliber of my arguments so their legitimacy is equal to that of my opponent’s?  Where would that get us?  Nowhere.  Stalemate would ensue, and nothing would be resolved.  And if you cannot make a decision about what’s right, how can you make a decision about what to do? 

 

            This is where I will offer a criticism of President Obama.  In his Inaugural Address, he said, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”  Why should we not discuss whether our government is too big or too small?  A government that is large will be able to micromanage the lives of its constituents to a larger degree than a small government.  To say that we should not discuss the size of government is to say that we should not discuss what the role of government should morally be.  To base the existence of a government program on how well it accomplishes its objectives is not to base its existence on whether that program should exist. 

 

            This is not the kind of “discussion” that should go into the enactment of government policy.  For us to not examine our lives is to lead lives not worth living.  For us to not ask of ourselves whether what we’re doing is right is for us not to be right.  And why should we not try to be as upstanding as possible? 

 

            And in passing the $819bn economic stimulus package, our government leaders never seemed to ask whether this is the proper role of government—to spend money procured through coercive taxes to stimulate faster GDP growth.  It was a general consensus that the government ought to deficit-spend the country out of a temporary market correction.  Obama said of opposition to the bill, “What we can't do is to drag our feet or allow the same partisan differences to get in our way.”  So as long as the minority party is willing to comply with the majority party’s agenda, surrender their liberty of free speech, give up on criticism and oversight, and cease being a gadfly—if the minority ceases to be the Indispensable Opposition—might will make right in this country.  Obama’s plan did not pass because it was better; it passed because more people in the appropriate position of power believe it is.  Today, Andrew Sullivan writes:

 

“There's nothing inherently wrong or cynical about the GOP opposing Obama's stimulus package. It may be politically stupid (I suspect it is); it may even be insincere (did these people ever really stop Bush's out-of-control spending?); but a few raspberries against a highly popular and talented president are a sign of democratic health.” 

 

The 19^th-century philosopher Herbert Spencer asked, “If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?”  If people assist or do not resist the making of a tyranny over them, are they still free because they enslaved themselves?  They are not.  If we comply once, if we fail to resist once, it sets a precedent to never resist again.  It is at that point that republican government is betrayed. 

 

            To act, we must make value judgments.  We must decide what is right and wrong, and go from there.  We shouldn’t just panic, not think rationally, and decide that positive action is necessary (such as government spending), instead of negative action (such as tax cuts).  Sullivan blogs: “As they consider the size and scope of the $800-billion-plus economic recovery plan, 46% are worried that the government will end up doing too much while 42% worry that it will do too little.” 

 

It is the proper function of government which is being considered by the nation’s constituencies.  Senator Obama, your plebeians--your common men--care about “whether our government is too big or too small.” 

Walter Lippmann's "The Indispensable Opposition" can be found at http://grossmont.gcccd.cc.ca.us/bertdill/docs/IndispensableOpposition.pdf

"Troubled US bank Citigroup has cancelled an order for a new corporate jet after President Barack Obama questioned the wisdom of the purchase."

Two questions:
1. Why are we letting Obama's personality cult set our own personal standards?
2. Why are we letting government control what we spend our money on as though ours were a command economy?

It's too bad that it's consumption of goods that drives and economy, and that you can't consume jetfuel unless you have a jet to fuel.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7855554.stm