Here is an interesting article on the tax reform debate that is part of a larger push to pass a big tax reform bill after the next election. Congress is trying to be serious about fixing the tax system, rather than just grandstand on it. They may even be willing to tackle such touchy things as the mortgage interest deduction, corporate welfare and so forth. The hint that they are serious is that the Democrats are playing nice on the issue. The truth of American politics is that nothing gets passed without the blessing of the Democrats.
Old bulls like Max Baucus on the Democrat side are actively looking for big ideas to fix the tax system. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp is having his staff draft bills for consideration this fall. When you have big shots in both parties in both houses working on something, it usually means there’s been some deal making done to get past the regular nonsense. When the old bulls are waging their fingers or carping at one another across party lines, you know it is all theater, not a serious effort.
It sounds promising until I get to this:
On the Senate side, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) asked colleagues in both parties to submit recommendations on which tax preferences should be preserved, starting from a “blank slate” where all current benefits are eliminated. To provide senators political cover and deniability, the committee put all recommendations under a 50-year top-secret classification, and restricted access to them to just 10 staff members.
Dullards like Kevin Williamson picked up on this claiming this is why the public seems to be siding with Edward Snowden over the rulers. It is a variation of the Old Testament warning from a prophet about how death is coming because the people have turned away from God. The conservative version of this is that the gods are angry because we have turned away from our constitutional principles. It’s circular reasoning. We are losing our republic because we have abandoned the basics of republic government. No kidding.
It misses an important point. The people in charge resort to these sorts of remedies not because they don’t rust the system They do this because they no longer trust themselves as a ruling class. That’s why they are employing the Cone of Silence. They know if this stuff gets out, members will use it against one another. Put another way, they are afraid to be candid with one another, because they fear their candor will be turned into a weapon against them in the future. Everyone assumes everyone else is a liar and a knave.
They also know the army of lobbyists will start pounding the war drums in order to get their special deal in the final bill. With a man in the White House willing to sell his daughters into slavery to score ideological points, no one can trust that there will be an honest debate or even a discussion if it is held in public. The result is that the elected representatives of the people have to abandon the fundamentals of self-government in order to get anything done in Washington. Is there any wonder they have so little respect for the Constitution?
An essential point that people on our side have to understand is that constitutions and political ideology are the result, not the cause. Principles are the rules the winning side imposes after they win. The constitution was written by the victors of the Revolutionary War and the post-war squabbling among the elites in the former colonies. The mercantile class of the North allied with the planter class in the South, came together to impose a political system on the new country that worked for them as a ruling elite.