Why We Should Care that 279 Members of Congress Have Promised Not to Do Their Jobs

"For heaven’s sake, you have Grover Norquist wandering the earth in his white robes saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he’ll defeat you. He can’t murder you. He can’t burn your house. The only thing he can do to you, as an elected official, is defeat you for reelection. And if that means more to you than your country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we’re in extremity, you shouldn’t even be in Congress."—Former US Senator Alan Simpson, “I Guess I’m a RINO”

       When the current moment becomes history, I suspect that historians will be as baffled as I am by the fact that 238 members of the House of Representatives and 41 Senators—all but three of them Republicans—have signed something called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” in which they promise that they will never (ever, ever) cast a single vote to raise taxes. Given that “the power of the purse” is one of the most important duties entrusted to Congress by the Constitution, the pledge they have taken amounts to a solemn oath not to do their jobs.

       Let me be very clear here. I am not saying that the job of a legislator is to raise taxes. It is to determine, by the facts available at a given moment, what the appropriate rate of taxation should be. This is not an easy job; it requires a painstaking balancing of different interests and potential consequences, which is why legislators get large staffs, big salaries, and choice parking in downtown Washington DC to deliberate about such things. Nothing shuts down the purpose of a deliberative body quite like an a priori declaration that you will not, under any circumstances, deliberate.  

       Anyone making an absolute and unconditional promise not to ever vote to increase taxes must, of logical necessity, accept one of the following statements: 1) that there will never ever ever come a time when raising the tax rate is in the best interest of the country; or 2) that something (i.e. campaign contributions, the political support of the anti-tax lobby, etc.) is more important than doing what is in the best interest of the country.

       Since no politician will ever admit to believing the second statement (as true as it might be), the only possible grounds for signing the tax pledge is that one believes that there is NOTHING that could EVER justify a tax increase, which is clearly an insane position to take, our not being gods or having access to the future and all.

       The Founders—especially Alexander Hamilton—thought about this stuff quite a bit, and they tried hard to design a system that would be capable of responding to anything that the future might throw at them or us. In Federalist #34, Hamilton argues that the government’s power to tax should be virtually unlimited because the issues requiring a government response are impossible to anticipate:

We must bear in mind that we are not to confine our view to the present period, but to look forward to remote futurity. Constitutions of civil government are not to be framed upon a calculation of existing exigencies, but upon a combination of these with the probable exigencies of ages, according to the natural and tried course of human affairs. Nothing, therefore, can be more fallacious than to infer the extent of any power, proper to be lodged in the national government, from an estimate of its immediate necessities. There ought to be a CAPACITY to provide for future contingencies as they may happen; and as these are illimitable in their nature, it is impossible safely to limit that capacity.

          What is the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” if not a unilateral decision by an individual elected official to limit the government's capacity to raise revenue for an indefinite period of time? It assumes, not only that the government does not need more revenue right now; it assumes that the government will never, under any conditions, need more revenue. Such an assumption as Hamilton clearly understood, is an abdication of the Constitutional responsibility to govern.

       Alan Simpson has apostatized from the Republican Party to tell us that now would be a good time to consider raising taxes--and cutting spending--in order to reduce the deficit. There are some fairly compelling reasons to listen to him. The federal tax rate is currently at its lowest point since the end of World War II, and, not coincidentally, the deficit is higher as a percent of GDP than it has been since 1947. Serious economists on both the left and the right agree that we cannot manage the debt without raising taxes, and Americans support modest tax increases for deficit reduction by a 2-1 margin. And yet, as Simpson acknowledges, we will almost certainly not see any Republicans voting to increase taxes any time in the near future because “Grover Norquist won’t let them.”

       The important question, now, is ours: why do we keep sending people to Congress to do a job that they have signed a written agreement not to do?

Founderstein: How to Turn Eight Dead White Guys into One Political Monster

Anybody who spends enough time digging around in the graveyards of American political theory knows about “Founderstein”—an ideological monstrosity that, like Frankenstein’s monster, borrows bits and pieces from those safely dead—from, that is, the the speeches, published essays, letters, and journals of any number of different Founding Fathers slapped together with absolutely no concern for context, rhetorical intent, or the tremendous differences between the individual Founders.

The most common Modern version of Founderstein looks something like this:

·      Thomas Paine’s belief in small government

·      Patrick Henry’s religious devotion

·      Benjamin Franklin’s scientific mind

·      Thomas Jefferson’s classical learning

·      Alexander Hamilton’s support of business interests

·      George Washington’s leadership vision

·      John Adams’ incorruptible integrity

·      James Madison’s love of the Constitution

          One could certainly be forgiven a bit of idolatry in the face of such a political saint! That such a fellow never existed might dampen our enthusiasm a little bit, but this is pretty much the central-casting version of all of the “Founding Fathers” in books like Tim Lahay’s Faith of Our Founding Fathers, Larry Schweikart’s What Would the Founders Say? And just about anything by Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, or Sean Hannity.

            However, if we take these same eight men and combine another set of characteristics, we end up with a very different Founderstein—one just as monstrous as the first but designed for a different kind of political argument:

·      Thomas Paine’s strident atheism

·      Patrick Henry’s implacable opposition to the Constitution

·      Benjamin Franklin’s sexual adventurism

·      Thomas Jefferson’s deism

·      Alexander Hamilton’s desire for large, centralized governments

·      George Washington’s lifelong ownership of slaves

·      John Adams’ naïveté

·      James Madison’s shifting political allegiances

            But this creature never existed either.  “The Founding Fathers” were not all well-educated, devout Christians who sought to limit the power of government any more than they were slave-owning atheists who wanted to expand the power of government. They were actual human beings with insights and moral lapses, virtues and vices, and, perhapsm most importantly, little ability to agree with each other about much of anything. That is how human beings operate in this world.

The Founderstein phenomenon, however, does not come from this world. It comes from the world of myth, where virtues are amplified and disagreements are suppressed. And it is only by invoking the world of myth that anybody can say “the Founding Fathers believed. . . .” and end up with anything like a coherent argument. Other than a vague feeling that the American colonies were better off ruling themselves than being ruled by the British, there is not a single belief that can be attributed to everybody who can be reasonably termed a “Founding Father.”

The fallacy in the Founderstein phenomenon lies in the fact that it relies entirely on three false assumptions:

1.     That the term “Founders” represents a specific group of men (women need not apply) who have been universally recognized as the framers of the Constitution and the designers of the government that has endured for more than 230 years.

2.     That these men agreed with each other on all, or even some, of the major political issues of their day, thereby making a quote by any one of them adequate proof of “what the Founders believed.”

3.     That these men—some of whom lived into their 90s—held consistent opinions about important issues during their entire public lives.

These assumptions are not just false; they are all profoundly wrong. Together, they create an ahistorical, one-dimensional version of the Founding Fathers that is good only for creating proof-text arguments—strings of quotations that pay no attention to the ideological differences of the Founders or the rhetorical contexts of their words. Want to prove that the Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians? Easy. Quote a line from one of Hamilton’s youthful love sonnets, a phrase from one of George Washington’s ghostwritten speeches, and something that ended up in the Kentucky Constitution that may have been put there by Madison. Want to prove that they were all non-Christian deists? Grab Franklin’s autobiography, Jefferson’s letters to Joseph Priestley, and quote liberally from Paine’s The Age of Reason.  It's easy, it's fun, and no matter which way you decide to go, somebody else has already looked up the quotes. All you you have to do is Google.

And reading is hard work.