Losing my liberal credentials

It should come as no surprise to most people who know me that my ideological inclinations lean progressive liberal. I believe there is a role for society in ensuring the health and well-being of everyone, most especially the most vulnerable. I also believe that government is often the most efficient mechanism to ensure that public goods (e.g. education, social welfare, research, defense, etc) are provided to the general public, particularly the most vulnerable.

However, I apparently lost some of my liberal street cred because I refuse to be steadfastly opposed to the debt deal that was passed by the House last night and will likely be approved by the Senate today. I don't believe in hurting people (or myself) to serve ideological purity. Therefore, I am not liberal enough. The fact that I believe that this is not the best deal that could have emerged and that I would have preferred something else apparently does not matter.

Not only that, but because I completely refuse to put the blame for this on President Obama, I am also a sell out. Or a fool. A damn fool, according to one acquaintance.

There are two important reasons why this attitude is both wrong and dangerous. First, putting the onus on the president to solve the budget problem betrays a serious misunderstanding of the legal structure of our government. Second, this attitude is the exact mirror of the right wing perspective that my liberal purist friends and acquaintances profess to detest.

A little lesson on the law: the Congress is responsible for the budget, including the debt.

There's a document that guides pretty much everything that we do here in the USA. It's called the Constitution. It sets the framework for our government and enumerates the rights citizens can expect our government will uphold. For liberals, we rely on the Constitution to ensure everything from fair trials to free speech. Well, there's a little thing found in Article I, Section 8 that should guide our understanding of what is wrong with the whole debt ceiling mess:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States ... (emphasis added)

The powers of the Congress are further enumerated, including:

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

and

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

The president's responsibilities are also enumerated in the Constitution. Of particular interest here is that the president has a pretty small role in the crafting and passage of legislation (including the budget). The president's main job is to review legislation passed by both houses of Congress and either sign the legislation or veto it. Beyond this, Article II, Section 3 in the Constitution does provide for the following:

...from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; .... he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, ....

If you notice, Congress has most of the power here. The passage of laws, including the budget, is entirely the responsibility of Congress. The president's leverage is the veto. That is it.

So, forgive me, my liberal colleagues, friends, and others, if I just don't buy the argument that this is all Obama's fault. Did the president make recommendations regarding the budget and the debt ceiling to the Congress? Did he convene both houses of Congresses in this extraordinary occasion to resolve this disagreement? Why, yes he did. Could he impose his will, whatever that may have been, on recalcitrant members of Congress, some of whom were hell bent on going into default? No. The Constitution does not allow it. If we are going to rely on the Constitution to protect us from the government and each other, we need to also accept the structure of responsibilities between the Executive and the Congress that is laid out in it.

Blaming the president for the many undesirable provisions in the debt ceiling plan displaces responsibility for this problem from its true agent: Congress. It is Congress that holds the power here, as was clearly demonstrated over the past few weeks. It is members of Congress who should be held accountable for both the crisis and the consequences of dragging this on for this long. By putting all of their energies and expectations onto the president, liberals and progressives remove themselves from the responsibility from doing the harder work of electing responsible members of Congress.

Obsessing over the president's "failure" to ensure tax revenue was part of the deal to me is like blaming the CEOs of publicly traded companies for laying off workers, rather than the shareholders and investors whose expectations for never-ending increases in dividends make laying off workers a rational choice. And if you really want to know who to blame, talk with the voters who elected the dozens of Tea Party Republicans who made this the crisis it came to be.


Liberal ideological puritanism is just as bad as conservative ideological puritanism

Ignorance of the Constitution is regrettable, but also understandable. For almost a century, the power of the Executive has grown over time. The existence of strong presidents who appeared to impose their desires on an unwilling Congress is a fiction supported by a misreading of history and by the willful spread of misinformation. What I find more disturbing is that the behavior and attitude displayed by some of my fellow progressives and liberals is eerily similar to the objectionable behaviors and attitudes of the rabid right wing ideologues who are the primary source of this crisis.

Much has been made about the demonizing of moderates and liberals by right wing, Tea Party types. This is a legitimate criticism. But when Democrats in Congress refer to the debt deal as a "Satan sandwich" and describe their colleagues as terrorists, they are participating in the exact same kind of demonization. I'm just not inclined to believe that those who hold different views of the world or different ideas about what is right and wrong are inherently bad people. They may be greedy, power hungry, or hypocrites. Or they may be misled or ignorant of the true consequences of their beliefs. Or they may have a truly different value system. But many of those who share my left leaning inclinations have come to the view that everyone who is to the right of them are inherently greedy, power hungry, bigoted hypocrites.

There is a serious problem with this perspective. By demonizing and dehumanizing those whose view of the good is different than yours, you are absolved from the hard work of actually making the argument in favor of your position. You can rest on your characterizations of evilness and bad faith, as if that alone justifies your view. If such behaviors and attitudes are unacceptable when perpetrated by the right wing, they are equally unacceptable by progressives, liberals, and moderates.

Further, there is no meaningful difference between refusing to budge on restructuring Social Security and refusing to budge on tax reform. The outcome is the same: no action. There are definitely times when no action is the best course of action. This was not one of them. The consequences of going into default was immediate harm to the most vulnerable members of society with little to no chance of long term gain. We would have gotten nothing in the long term, except the cold comfort that we were right. We would have imposed a serious economic burden on many individuals and families, even furthered hampered a very fragile economic recovery, and the rest of the world would have been justified in beginning the process of containing its economic relationship with the US. On the latter point, if you haven't been paying attention, China and India are steadily catching up to the US in terms of consumption and economic power.

In my view, there are few values that are absolute. Even the one of the most fundamental of human values, thou shalt not kill, can be loosened under the right circumstance. So, while I am heartbroken that the agreement includes removing subsidized graduate student loans, and knowing that this will probably also impact me as a college professor, if the choice was subsidized student loans or default, I'm going to vote to get rid of student loans. Knowing, too, that it is something that could always be changed later if me and my liberal/progressive/moderate colleagues do the hard work in ensuring that reasonable people are elected into Congress in the future.

So I refuse to be blinded by the righteousness of my view. I also do not believe that this is about my side versus their side but about doing a better job convincing people that my view better meets their goals and better supports their fundamental values. And I believe in holding accountable those who were truly in the positions of power to do the right thing. If this means that I am not the liberal you want me to be, so be it. I was never good at conforming to other people's expectations anyway. And it does not change my inclination to do what I can to prevent harm to those who are vulnerable to the consequences of demagoguery of all forms.