America Shuts Down!

I feel genuinely sorry for the armies of reasonable conservatives (this is NOT an oxymoron) that have absolutely nowhere to go because their party is being taken over by a mob of angry pitch fork wielding nutcases. Never has there be a more urgent need for a third party reclaiming the political middle ground.

I agree completely, but I think the conservatives should take back the GOP I respect and throw the petulant children out. Let the Tea Party be a party. Radicals have ideas that centrists will never come up with, and occasionally one of them is good. But clearly they cannot govern and will not let the grown-ups do it either.

Tim
 
I read today where a congressman was complaining that the government shutdown was costing one of the big defense contractors 20 million per day in lost revenue. If I was a congressman that was worried about a defense contractor losing 20 million per day knowing they are still in business making money from the government during the shutdown, I probably would have kept that tidbit of information to myself.
 
During the civil war we had a true militia system. Our stading army and sophisticated weaponry would make quick work of any insurrection. .

Republicanss could join with the democrats and easily make the Tea Party irrelavant,
 
I agree completely, but I think the conservatives should take back the GOP I respect and throw the petulant children out. Let the Tea Party be a party. Radicals have ideas that centrists will never come up with, and occasionally one of them is good. But clearly they cannot govern and will not let the grown-ups do it either.

Tim

I think the GOP brand is damaged goods beyond repair. How can you unite a party of religious fundamentalist (Santorum and ilk), ignorami (think Palin and Herman Cain), out of touch elitists (Romney Inc.) and populist economic terrorists (Ted Cruz e.a.)? The last reasonable conservative I heard was John Huntsman. Better start with a clean slate. May be some billionaire will fund the startup.
 
Another part of the problem (well, maybe it's included in Greg and Tim's comments) is that the traditional post-WWII Republican values of fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, social consciousness and a "policing" yet potentially compromising foreign policy are really nowhere to be found today.
 
Another part of the problem (well, maybe it's included in Greg and Tim's comments) is that the traditional post-WWII Republican values of fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, social consciousness and a "policing" yet potentially compromising foreign policy are really nowhere to be found today.

The GOP has evolved into a ragtag band of morally, ideologically and politically confused angry white man. Time to move on and try something new.
 
I think the GOP brand is damaged goods beyond repair. How can you unite a party of religious fundamentalist (Santorum and ilk), ignorami (think Palin and Herman Cain), out of touch elitists (Romney Inc.) and populist economic terrorists (Ted Cruz e.a.)? The last reasonable conservative I heard was John Huntsman. Better start with a clean slate. May be some billionaire will fund the startup.

You forgot the Neocons; they were fun. We're still paying for them in nation-building, international bad will and veteran's care. We will be paying for them for a long time. This is where I think choosing the lesser of two evils is really important. When it comes to domestic policy, even fiscal policy, the difference between Dems and the mainstream GOP is not all that significant and really, they can't do that much damage. International policy? One bad administration can do damage that lasts for decades. Diplomatically, financially and just in terms of human costs.

Tim
 
I see how fragile and sensitive the president Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans are. ...America is in limbo.

And the Chinese and the Japanese are still smiling and laughing, for now.
 
I see how fragile and sensitive the president Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans are. ...America is in limbo.

And the Chinese and the Japanese are still smiling and laughing, for now.

Even the Greeks are laughing at this charade .....
 
The American debt has more to do with China than anyone else though; because the bulk of the American debt is owed to them.

Not even close, Bob. The bulk if the American debt is owed to Americans. Only 48% us owed to all foreign investors combined. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It means we're still considered a good investment. The biggest single holder is the social security trust fund.

Tim
 
Not even close, Bob. The bulk of the American debt is owed to Americans.

Tim

That too (normal American people are paying big time for all the corruption by the big businesses in America).
...But google around Tim, and check how much of that overall American debt is owed to the Chinese people.
 
That too (normal American people are paying big time for all the corruption by the big businesses in America).
...But google around Tim, and check how much of that overall American debt is owed to the Chinese people.
Not surprisingly it's hard to find reliable figures, but many estimates are around 25%, or about half of the total held by non-US investors.
 
Republicans and Democrats have been fighting over numbers (their accuracy) since the foundation of the American empire.
And they're still at it big time.

And that, is only one of the major problems in that country. ...Capitalism, the fake stock market, the big corrupted corporations, the bad investments, and the little people (American population outside of Hollywood's megastars and all that filthy rich jazz elite without any scruples and full of corrupted artifices).

But America is just a dot, a glitch, a base in the entire world; and has powerful influences on the global economy. ...We'll see...
...Eight more days to go.

Democracy? ...For who?
 
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It's easy casting those stones isn't it Bob from someone looking in

I won't bother to take the time to remind you of some of the fiascos that go on within your government or between Anglophones and Quebecois in years gone by

I'd be careful Bob and think before you post
 
I'm telling it from my viewpoint Steve, and like I already mentioned before; in my own country I feel truly sick from my own federal government.
And yes, I hate the Parti Quebecois with La Charte des Valeurs! ...This is racism in Quebec, discrimination!
But this thread is about U.S.A. and their own government, and the shutdown, and the two big opposing forces, and the American debt, and people's care (American's well being), and I got some opinion about that too.

Steve, I am extremely polite and respectful and considerate and thoughtful in my posting. If you judge the opposite, just delete me.
I always think trice before I post. ...And I always edit all my posts in the best interest of the entire community.

* I hope that you don't take anything personal Steve; look at it like an intelligent discussion among some of the brightest citizens on CNN.
 
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It's easy casting those stones isn't it Bob from someone looking in

I won't bother to take the time to remind you of some of the fiascos that go on within your government or between Anglophones and Quebecois in years gone by

I'd be careful Bob and think before you post

Well said Steve! We have our set of problems. Corruption and pork-barreling is just as prevalent. Our Senate is a damned disgrace, and Harper by proroguing the legislature is showing nothing but a cowardly act of not wanting to face the mess. Luckily it never went away and he's on the hot seat for it now.
 
It's quite interesting and illuminating; all the smart around-the-table discussions on repeated principles and historical philosophies.

Newt has a great show (discussions) with some very smart guests sometimes.

And now, October 17th doesn't appear a date limit (critical) so more (October 31st is its newer replacement).
 
How the Supreme Court can resolve the debt ceiling crisis

By Adam H. Rosenzweig | National Constitution Center

Adam H. Rosenzweig from the Washington University School of Law proposes a different approach to ending the debt ceiling crisis: Let the Supreme Court resolve it as a Constitutional matter.

Some scholars have argued that there are no Constitutional options if the debt ceiling is not raised, meaning the president would be forced to choose the least unconstitutional option. Others have argued that the president has the power under Article 4 of the 14th Amendment to issue debt in contravention of the debt ceiling. Others still have argued that the president has inherent emergency powers under Article II of the Constitution to do so.

As most American schoolchildren learned in civics class, the United States government is composed of three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. If the legislative and executive cannot—or will not—comply with their Constitutional obligations, should the judiciary step in? In other words, what is the proper role of the Supreme Court in remedying Constitutional violations arising from fiscal policy showdowns, such as the debt ceiling standoff, between Congress and the president?
The Supreme Court engages with Constitutional issues arising from the coordinate federal branches all the time. When Congress enacts a law that violates the Constitution, the Supreme Court can strike down the law as unconstitutional. When the Executive violates the Constitution, the Supreme Court can order the Executive to fulfill its Constitutional obligations.

In the case of the debt ceiling, however, neither would suffice. Even if it wanted to, the Supreme Court couldn’t order the president to spend money that wasn’t in the Treasury nor could it order Congress to pass a statute authorizing new debt or cutting spending.
So in limited circumstances, such as those of the debt ceiling crisis, the sole remaining option would be for the federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, to impose taxes or borrow money to remedy the Constitutional violation.

While at first glance this may seem like an odd, or even outrageous, proposition, in fact the Supreme Court recognized the power of federal courts to do something strikingly similar over 20 years ago. In the case of Missouri v. Jenkins, the district court ordered the school district of Kansas City, Missouri, to undertake certain spending to comply with Brown v. Board of Education.

The school district attempted to pass a new tax to comply with the court’s order, but the state of Missouri adopted a state constitutional amendment banning the district from doing so. The district court found the state’s actions unconstitutional and therefore struck down the ban. Unfortunately, this was not sufficient to raise the money because the school district had never authorized a tax levy in the first place. So the court was forced to impose taxes and issue bonds directly. On appeal, although the details get somewhat complicated because of the state and local nature of school districts, the Supreme Court effectively held that such an order would be within the inherent power of the courts to remedy Constitutional violations.

This power of federal courts to raise and spend money is not unique in the history of the United States, nor is it limited to school desegregation. For example, courts have the inherent power to impose and collect fines from people held in contempt. But nothing in Article III of the Constitution, which vests the judicial power of the United States in the Supreme Court and the other federal courts created by Congress, says anything about a contempt power or a power to impose and collect fines. Yet it is well-accepted that such a power must exist or else the courts would not be able to fully exercise the judicial power.

Similarly, if a federal officer violates a citizen’s Constitutional rights, that citizen has the right to sue the officer for damages in a so-called Bivens action. The Supreme Court has made clear that, if the government loses a Bivens action, the fact that the government does not have enough money to pay cannot be a defense. Thus, by ordering the government to pay money damages that were not budgeted by Congress, the courts are effectively ordering the government to raise taxes or borrow money.
So in the debt ceiling crisis why not let the Supreme Court resolve it? If failure to raise the debt ceiling really would violate the Constitution and no other, more limited, remedies are available, the Supreme Court could invoke its inherent Article III fiscal powers to solve the problem.
Of course, some technical and procedural hurdles would need to be overcome for a debt ceiling case to reach the Supreme Court. But none of these should prevent such a case from making it to the Court.

At a minimum, the Social Security Trust Fund, one of the largest holders of federal debt, could sue for payment if the government threatened to default on that debt. Ordering payment on a debt is something the courts are particularly good at and, if failing to do so would result in the Fund permanently losing a portion of the value of the assets it needs to pay mandatory Social Security benefits, this would seem to establish the type of “irreparable harm” that typically justifies courts stepping in and doing so immediately.

But what about separation of powers? Would the Court be overly intruding into areas reserved to Congress in exercising the Article III fiscal power? Maybe yes and maybe no.
The Supreme Court has recognized a number of situations in which the federal courts can exercise powers that look surprisingly like legislative powers. For example, the Supreme Court has upheld the power of the federal courts to impose their own Congressional districts when legislatures can’t or won’t do so in a Constitutional manner.
Similarly, courts can decide how to manage and operate prisons, including which to close, what staff to hire, and how to fund them, to prevent constitutional violations. This was made explicit recently by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata, the California prison case, when it stated “Courts may not allow constitutional violations to continue simply because a remedy would involve intrusion into the realm of prison administration.” Replace “prison administration” with “fiscal matters” and we have the debt ceiling crisis.

But isn’t the Court supposed to stay out of issues committed to the political branches under the so-called political question doctrine? What could be more inherently political than a political showdown between the two democratically elected branches of government over fiscal policy?
This is true, to an extent. If the matter was one of a political debate over whether to engage in a new spending program, such an argument would be persuasive. With the debt ceiling, however, the political branches have painted themselves into a proverbial corner. By issuing debt and authorizing spending, the political branches implicated Constitutional protections they need not have. But once implicated, the fact that a political fight leads to the violation of these protections should not cloak the Constitutional violation behind the veil of the political question doctrine.

In an ideal world the political branches would solve the debt ceiling crisis on their own, recognizing that honoring the federal debt is a core commitment of the country. After all, part of the founding compromise soon after the ratification of the Constitution was for the federal government to assume the debts of the states incurred during the revolution, and part of the reconciliation after the Civil War was to mandate that the public debt not be called into question in the Constitution. But if the political branches can’t, or won’t, honor these commitments, the federal courts should.
Perhaps the Article III fiscal power has not been recognized until now because scholars assumed that a debt ceiling case would never get to the Supreme Court. Or perhaps some scholars did not equate the existing inherent powers of the courts as functionally equivalent to the government’s fiscal powers.
Regardless, in the face of the current debt crisis the recognition of a robust, but limited and well-demarcated, Article III fiscal power could potentially offer a way out of the policy and political stalemate facing the country. If both Congress and the president knew that failing to raise the debt ceiling would invite five justices of the Supreme Court to choose how to fund the government, the odds of a stalemate would likely reduce dramatically.
Perhaps the mere recognition of the existence of such a power could itself force the government out of its current rut, permitting the government to properly function once again within the Constitutional framework.

Adam H. Rosenzweig is a professor of law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, and he concentrates his research and teaching in the area of tax law and policy. His latest research paper, “The Article III Fiscal Power,” is available on the Social Science Research Network.
 
Timing

How the Supreme Court can resolve the debt ceiling crisis

By Adam H. Rosenzweig | National Constitution Center

Adam H. Rosenzweig from the Washington University School of Law proposes a different approach to ending the debt ceiling crisis: Let the Supreme Court resolve it as a Constitutional matter.

Steve,

In principal I agree with this but what about the timing? As I do not believe the current court could resolve this quickly there would be utter chaos when the deadline passes. Better to come up with a short term solution then let the court flex it's muscle. What would be fascinating to me is whether SCOUS would be willing to grant that much authority to the President given that the likelihood of a right leaning President being elected in the near future is not good!

Beau
 

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