The People’s House Holds the Purse-Strings (Some Constitutional Amendments #2)

by James J Heaney Posted on 21 October 2021

Many writers propose constitutional amendments in order to demonstrate their fantasy vision of the perfect regime. In this series, I propose realistic amendments to the Constitution aimed at improving the structure of the U.S. national government, without addressing substantive issues. Today’s proposal:

The bet-he's-thinking-about-other-women meme, but he's thinking a paraphrase of Col. Mason's comments to the Constitutional Convention on 8 August 1787.

AMENDMENT XXIX

1. All Bills which raise or appropriate money, or which issue or limit the size of the public debt, or which fix the salaries of Officers of the Government of the United States, shall originate in the House of Representatives, and shall not be altered or amended by the Senate.

2. The Senate shall vote on all such money bills within one year, voting by the Yeas and Nays, and the affirmative vote of a majority of the Senators duly chosen and sworn shall cause the bill to be passed. If, after one year, this vote has not been taken, the House may present the money bill to the President of the United States for signature, in like manner as if it had been passed by the Senate.

3. These provisions may be enforced by judicial proceedings.

That’s right: today’s proposal is an Origination Clause! It dictates that “money bills” must come from the House of Representatives, not the Senate.

Now, the Constitution already has one of these. But the current Origination Clause is so old, musty, and irrelevant that you may have forgotten that it even exists:

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Geld the Veto (Some Constitutional Amendments #1)

by James J Heaney Posted on 3 October 2021

Many writers propose constitutional amendments in order to demonstrate their fantasy vision of the perfect regime. In this series, I propose realistic amendments to the Constitution aimed at improving the structure of the U.S. national government, without addressing substantive issues. Today’s proposal:

AMENDMENT XXVIII
A two-thirds majority is not required to override a presidential veto.

As a result of this amendment, the relevant paragraph of Article I, Section 7 would be revised to read as follows:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law.

I put it to you that the central problem in the American system of government is that Congress is broken.

Bill from Schoolhouse Rock with a Veto stamp
Look how sad the Bill is after it gets vetoed? You don’t want Bill to be sad, do you?

Congress is (according to the Constitutional plan) the branch that makes the laws, the branch that sets all non-emergency policies (through laws, through the power of the purse, through its power to issue debt, through its power to declare war), and the branch that exercises the most direct and effective oversight of the other branches (not to mention the other house of Congress!). This is because Congress is the branch that most directly represents the interests and will of the voters, who are the ultimate source of authority for the entire system. All our branches of government are equal, but the Founders also clearly designed Congress as first-among-equals.

Congress is (in reality) the weakest branch, least-among-equals. Most laws are made by the executive branch through the regulatory process, or by the judicial branch through creative “interpretation.” Congress is unable to pass laws of its own, and routinely struggles to have its laws followed when it does. Congress is a squib, a spent force, the fundraising arm of the two-party system, a soundbite theatre, a Twitter trending topic… but it isn’t a legislature, and has not functioned as one for some time.

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Some Principles for Proposing Constitutional Amendments (On One’s Blog)

by James J Heaney Posted on 1 October 2021
The Constitution at the National Archives. Warms your heart to see it, doesn't it?
The Constitution at the National Archives. Warms your heart just to look at her, don’t it?

Let’s recklessly start another series! Worthy Reads is going well, but I don’t want the blog to be taken over by my clippings from other blogs, so I’ve been saving up Worthy Reads for months without writing anything else. It’s time to fix that. In each entry of this series, I’ll propose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution for your consideration.

Except for this entry. Today’s entry is an introduction.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

James Madison

James Madison famously believed that the Constitution required no Bill of Rights, because its fundamental structure was enough to secure the rights of the people. I think history has proved him wrong about that — but not entirely wrong. The structure of our government can, to a tremendous extent, shape its actions towards (or away from) the common good. By many measures, the most generous and popular Bill of Rights in the history of the world was contained in the Constitution of the Soviet Union… but the Soviet Union was structured in such a way that nothing its Bill of Rights said actually mattered or was in any way protected.

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Worthy Reads for 2021 July 28: Resisting Temptation

by James J Heaney Posted on 28 July 2021

Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article.

“Giving the Sickness A Name,” by Jeff Reimer:

A wily demon, acedia is difficult to pin down. It’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a boggart. It goes out of focus when you try to look directly at it. The term itself defies translation: despondency, sloth, lassitude, ennui, melancholy—each displays an aspect, none the full image.

The desert monks who first wrestled the demon acedia to the ground did so by grinding through their prayers in the pitiless heat of the Egyptian wilderness. In doing so they became superbly intimate with their failures. Evagrius had a theoretical bent and began cataloging the modes and patterns of failure he and his fellow monks encountered. […]

Percy’s gaze turned outward in his subsequent work. In 1971, he said that Love in the Ruins “deals, not with the takeover of a society by tyrants or computers or whatever, but rather with the increasing malaise and finally the falling apart of a society which remains, on the surface at least, democratic and pluralistic.” By 1986, in fact, when asked by an interviewer, “Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?” he could answer, “Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom…gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.” The interviewer follows up: “In connection with what is going on in the world?” Percy’s response: “Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia.”

This is my sly way of recommending Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. When I first read it, 15-odd years ago, I found it entertaining, but in some ways thought its parody-prediction of America had barked up the wrong tree; things Percy had predicted had not panned out. Unsurprising for a book written in 1968!

However, when I re-read the book last month, I was dumbfounded. Love in the Ruins is become more prescient over time… and proved itself, in 1968, a better interpreter of the American situation than I was in 2005.

Acedia, indeed.

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Worthy Reads This Week (2021 July 9): Lies, Damned Lies, and The Resultant Bipartisan Epistemic Crisis

by James J Heaney Posted on 9 July 2021

Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article.

“Repudiating Roe,” Part 1 and Part 2, by Michael Stokes Paulsen:

Here is my proposition: The doctrine of stare decisis cannot properly be understood or applied in such fashion as to permit the justices deliberately to render a decision contrary to the correct reading of the Constitution. Whenever it can be said, with sufficient confidence, that a prior decision is seriously and meaningfully wrong—not just technically mistaken in some minor, immaterial, or inconsequential respect; not a matter of reasonable disagreement; but out-and-out wrong in a way that matters—the justices’ ultimate duty to the Constitution obliges them to overrule the error. Roe is not a close case. It is a flat-out indefensible misreading of the Constitution with enormous consequences.

Paulsen is always worth reading, and it’s nice to see him come out swinging after six months in apparent hibernation. My own analysis of the Dobbs grant is here, and I linked last time to Shirif Girgis’s incisive look at Dobbs.

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An Asymmetry Observed: Partisan Obituaries

by James J Heaney Posted on 6 July 2021

Let’s talk about Donald Rumsfeld, sort of.

As longtime readers know, I generally cleave to the theory that the two American parties are symmetrical: in general, for every bad thing Party A does, Party B is doing exactly the same thing to exactly the same extent. Most people who think The Other Party is implacably evil (while Their Own Party is implacably incompetent) have, to be frank, lost perspective. For every scoundrel on the Right, there is an equal but opposite scoundrel on the Left, and vice versa. Once you’ve proved this a few dozen times, you can tune out 80% of partisan news.

However, this theory of partisan symmetry makes it all the more interesting when you come across a genuine asymmetry. And you do come across them from time to time! Right-wing and left-wing news-media consumption habits, for example, are profoundly asymmetrical. Why is there an asymmetry there when so much else is symmetrical?

Tease out those answers and you can tease out the Real Truths of American politics. For example, there’s a Scott Alexander article I often link to because I think its explanation of the media asymmetry is both compelling and reveals a great deal about how our politics operates.

I confirmed another interesting asymmetry this week, and now I’m puzzling over it: Why is the Left so much crueller toward the opposition’s dead?

Here is how mainstream partisan left-wing sources (listed in the Media Bias Chart v3.1) covered Donald Rumsfeld’s death:

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Worthy Reads This Week (2021 June 25)

by James J Heaney Posted on 25 June 2021

After finishing up my interview with Commissioner Simington, I immediately left for vacation, so this feature was delayed. However, I kept reading. As a result, my list is a bit longer than usual.

Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article.

“My Chat With Commissioner Simington“, by James Heaney:

Yeah, I’m listing my own piece as a “Worthy Read.”

I honestly expected this interview to make more of a splash, simply because my hit count tends to go up when I write about Net Neutrality… but I forgot the lesson of Freddie deBoer’s Incentives Experiment.

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My Chat with Commissioner Simington (Or: Fifteen Questions I Asked a Republican FCC Commissioner)

by James J Heaney Posted on 9 June 2021

Readers, I owe you an apology. Three weeks ago, when I posted Fifteen Questions I Would Like To Ask a Republican FCC Commissioner, I very strongly implied that it was a hypothetical exercise.

Image of my Microsoft Teams chat with Commissioner Simington.
See? Senate-confirmed Officers of the United States use Microsoft Teams just like you and me! Regular folks! (Fortunately, you can’t tell what an unflattering shot this is of me because the thumbnail is so tiny.)

It was not.

Early in May, I received an email from Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington. Simington said that he’d read my 2014 Net Neutrality article, “Why Free Marketeers Want To Regulate the Internet” a few years ago. Now that he is on the FCC, he is trying to figure out how to approach Net Neutrality, so he was looking for informed perspectives outside the bubble of DC policy discourse. Would I like to sit down with him on a video call and talk about it for a little while? I wrote my Fifteen Questions as preparation for our discussion.

We talked on my birthday, and, because I am the biggest nerd of all, it was the highlight of my day.

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Worthy Reads This Week (2021 May 27)

by James J Heaney Posted on 31 May 2021

Instead of just sharing articles on Facebook when I feel like it, I thought I might try rolling all the “shareworthy” things I encounter into a single weekly blog post. Like most “new features” on De Civitate, I expect I will do this twice and then forget about it, but, for now, please enjoy.

As the saying goes: Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article. (I mean, gracious, Ian Milhiser’s on this week’s list!)

“Against Crippled Religion” by Steve Skojec:

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Reading the Tea Leaves in the Supreme Court’s Grant of Dobbs

by James J Heaney Posted on 17 May 2021

Quickly dashing one off after today’s big news…

The Supreme Court has “granted cert” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, regarding a Mississippi ban on most second- and third-trimester abortions. (“Granting cert” means it will hear the case.)

It is generally agreed that the Mississippi ban is incompatible with current Supreme Court abortion precedents (which are themselves, it must be said, incompatible with both the Constitution of the United States and the “higher law” to which Sen. William Seward, R-NY once referred). The Mississippi law was struck down unanimously by a lower court panel, and there is no split among the lower-court circuits.

However, in the lower-court decision, a concurrence by Judge James Ho essentially said, “I am required to strike this law down because of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is a garbage, barbaric, eugenic precedent… but it’s binding,” then got down on his knees and begged the Supreme Court to overturn Casey. This is not the first time in recent months that a federal appeals court judge has acted consistent with Casey and begged the Supreme Court to overturn Casey.

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