“When congressmen scoff at the notion of reading legislation because they aren’t qualified or they aren’t competent to understand it, how can we be confident that those congressman are competent to reengineer the entire health care system?”

So asked a citizen at a town hall meeting where Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Senator Arlen Specter (D‑PA) held forth before a cantankerous crowd.

It’s a fair question. And President Obama offered an answer during his campaign. He promised that he would post bills coming to him from Congress online for five days before signing them. Rather than relying on Congress, the public should have more oversight of it.

(Alas, it’s a promise he has violated thirty-nine forty-one times. He signed two more bills into law last week within a day of receiving them.)

Under President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” pledge or the 72-hour-hold in Congress preferred by the Sunlight Foundation, members of Congress and senators would be more reticent to introduce potentially controversial amendments, and they would be more obliged to know and defend what is in the bills they vote on.

President Obama set the standard—if not the precedent—by which lawmaking practice will be judged. He will have to rise to that standard as the public has more leisure to take the measure of his presidency. Congress will too.

(It’s not the president’s Waterloo, of course. I just put that in the title to attract your attention.)

Steve Chapman points out in the Chicago Tribune:

The crisis in state budgets is not an accident, and it wasn’t unforeseeable. For years, most states have spent like there’s no tomorrow, and now tomorrow is here. They bring to mind the lament of Mickey Mantle, who said, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

If they had known the revenue flood wasn’t a permanent fact of life, governors and legislators might have prepared for drought. Instead, like overstretched homeowners, they took on obligations they could meet only in the best-case scenario — which is not what has come to pass.

Over the last decade, state budgets have expanded rapidly. We have had good times and bad times, including a recession in 2001, but according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, this will be the first year since 1983 that total state outlays have not increased.

The days of wine and roses have been affordable due to a cascade of tax revenue. In state after state, the government’s take has ballooned. Overall, the average person’s state tax burden has risen by 42 percent since 1999 — nearly 50 percent beyond what the state would have needed just to keep spending constant, with allowances for inflation.

Would that other journalists would show such good sense when governors and legislators moan about the draconian budget cuts they’re being forced to make, taking their state budgets back to the dark Dickensian days of 2003 or 2005.

Harry Patch died a little over a week ago. At 111 he was the last British veteran of World War I. No French or German participants in that horrid war survive. Only one American participant still lives–Frances Buckles, age 108, who drove an ambulance during the war.

World War I is largely ignored in America, but it seared Europe in particular, as well as other participants, such as Australia and New Zealand, onetime British colonies which sent off soldiers to die for their parent nation. Although less bloody than World War II, the first conflict set the stage for the second, far more murderous contest, as well as the Cold War that followed.

World War I, once called the war to end war, was foolish and stupid for all participants. Nothing was at stake that warranted a death toll which approached 20 million. On top were even more injured and maimed, economic collapse, and political chaos, leading to the rise of fascism, Nazism, and communism.

Harry Patch understood that he had been deployed in a mistaken crusade. Reports the Washington Times:

Mr. Patch did not speak about his war experiences until he was 100. Once he did, he was adamant that the slaughter he witnessed had not been justified.

“I met someone from the German side, and we both shared the same opinion: We fought, we finished and we were friends,” he said in 2007.

“It wasn’t worth it.”

War sometimes is necessary. But as Robert E. Lee intoned while looking down on the impressive military tableau at the battle of Fredericksburg, “It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.”

Harry Patch certainly understood. According to the Times:

His most vivid memory of the war was of encountering a comrade whose torso had been ripped open by shrapnel. “Shoot me,” Mr. Patch recalled the soldier pleading.

The man died before Patch could draw his revolver.

“I was with him for the last 60 seconds of his life. He gasped one word — ‘Mother.’ That one word has run through my brain for 88 years. I will never forget it.”

Stalinism was dropped even by the Soviet Union when the murderous Joseph Stalin died, but it has never disappeared completely. North Korea, for instance, mimics the bizarre personality cult promoted by the Soviet dictator.

Now Iran appears to be adopting the Stalinesque tactic of staging show trials, with “confessions” from the obviously brutalized accused. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

On Sunday, reaction by Iranian newspapers and Web sites to the trials of some 100 detained opposition members, including a former vice president, was polarized as some raised questions about whether their confessions were coerced.

The trial by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court appears to be paving the way for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to secure his grip on power and cap a gradual takeover of Iran’s political landscape by hardliners. Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose government claimed victory in the disputed June 12 presidential elections, is to be inaugurated Monday for a second four-year term. Opposition leaders said the election was rigged.

Top reformist figures appeared in court Saturday looking disheveled and dazed. They sat in the front row wearing gray prison pajamas and plastic slippers without socks, in an apparent attempt to humiliate them in public. The reform leaders were unshaven and had lost weight.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a cleric and former vice president to former President Mohamad Khatami, appeared without his robe and turban. Mr. Abtahi, who should legally be tried at the special tribunal for clerics, clutched a piece of paper and took the stand to give an elaborate confession. He said that reform leaders had been plotting for years to take over the government and had vowed to stick together.

By putting its outrageous repression forward front and center, the regime–fronted if not controlled by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–has delivered its own affirmative answer to the question whether the recent ballot was stolen. Although the regime has sufficient coercive force to remain in power at the present, it has sacrificed any remaining legitimacy at home as well as abroad. The oligarchy led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is likely to have an ever more difficult time fending off challenges within the governing elite as well as among the people.

Americans should wish the forces of liberty and democracy well. There is little that the U.S. government, with an unsavory record of supporting repression in Iran, can do, other than ensure that Washington does not divert attention from the responsibility of the Tehran regime for the many problems facing the Iranian people. But people around the nation and world can help publicize the struggle in Iran and provide Iranians with the tools of freedom, including freer access to the Internet. The Iranian struggle against tyranny is one with which all lovers of liberty should identify.

At the March 24 argument in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. government argued that Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (otherwise known as McCain-Feingold) permits the FEC to ban corporations, including ideological nonprofits like Citizens United, from making independent expenditures on films, books, or even “a sign held up in Lafayette Park.” The jurisprudential justification for this extraordinary and shockingly expansive view of the government’s power to suppress political speech traces to the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce. In Austin, the Court held that Michigan had a compelling state interest in banning political speech funded with wealth accumulated using the corporate form. Though the Court contended that such speech, because it bears little correlation to public support for the political ideas expressed, constituted a “different type of corruption,” in reality it upheld Michigan’s statute as a “counterbalance” to the “distorting” and “unfair” influence corporate funds could have on the outcome of elections.

This relative-equality rationale—suppressing disfavored speakers to enhance the voice of other government-favored speakers—is antithetical to core First Amendment protections and elsewhere has been expressly rejected by the Court (in Buckley v. Valeo and, more recently, in Davis v. FEC). Accordingly, to decide Citizens United’s appeal, the Court ordered rebriefing and reargument on Austin’s continuing validity.

On Friday, Cato filed its brief, the second we’ve filed in the case. We argue that Austin, and the part of McConnell v. FEC that upheld Section 203’s facial validity, are not entitled to stare decisis deference and should thus be overturned. These relatively recent decisions are poorly reasoned, have engendered no reliance interests (no one relies on less freedom of speech), and have spawned an unworkable and irrational campaign finance system in which the government rations different levels of permissible political speech to otherwise equally situated speakers.

The case will be reargued September 9, in a special session about a month before the official start of the Court’s new term.

Here’s a Cato Institute video detailing some elements of the original Citizens United oral argument:

Recent comments by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers illustrate the incoherence of the administration’s fiscal policy. Previously, they were against raising taxes in the short-run because that would damage the economic recovery. Now they are hinting or suggesting that recovery depends on raising taxes to reduce the deficit.

Previously, they supported rising levels of spending and deficits to supposedly grow the economy, but now they are saying that deficits need to be cut for the economy to grow. Geithner and Summers seem to be repeatedly changing their message depending on the political requirements of the news cycle, rather than providing a consistent program based on economic theory.

The reality is that rising taxes and spending suck resources out of the private sector economy, which damages growth whether we are in an expansion or a contraction. That’s because governments in America already consume more than one-third of everything produced in the nation, and so further resources added to the government sector produce very little or negative returns.

Geithner and Summers ought to stop trying to manipulate the short-term macroeconomy, and instead focus on economic reforms to remove obstacles to private sector growth over the long-term.

Over the weekend Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who’s had a bit of trouble paying his own taxes, made it clear–in Washington-speak–that tax hikes are coming. He appeared on air with George Stephanopoulos. 

Byron York of the Washington Examiner provides the transcript of the relevant Q&A:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Former deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman said it is no longer a matter of whether tax revenues should increase but how. Is he right?

GEITHNER: George, it is absolutely right and very important for everyone to understand we will not get this economy back on track, recovery will not be strong enough to sustain unless we can convince the American people that we’re going to have the will to bring these deficits down once recovery is firmly established. Remember we inherited a one point three trillion dollar deficit. The cumulative consequences of the policies this country pursued over the last 8 years left us with 6 million dollars of more debt than we would have had by making a bunch of commitments to cut taxes and add to spending without paying for those. We are not going to be able to afford to do that. And it is very important that people understand that. Our first priority now though is to get this economy back on track, make sure this financial system is repaired. Without that, we’re not going to get our deficits under control and the necessary path to fiscal responsibility, the necessary path to getting this country living within our means again is not just health care reform, to bring down those costs, but we’re going to a range of other things and that’s going to be a very difficult challenge for this country. We can do this, it just requires the will to act.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Including new revenues?

GEITHNER: Well, we’re going to have to look at — we’re going to have to do what’s necessary. Remember the critical thing is people understand that when we have recovery established, led by the private sector, then we have to bring these deficits down very dramatically. We have to bring them down to a level where the amount we’re borrowing from the world is stable at a reasonable level. And that’s going to require some very hard choices. And we’re going to have to do that in a way that does not add unfairly to the burdens that the average American already faces.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s the dilemma, isn’t it?

GEITHNER: That is the dilemma.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Because when you look at health care reform again _ I know you believe it’s going to bend the cost curve over time. But the Congressional Budget office says, at best, the health care reform plans out there are going to be deficit-neutral over the next ten years. So to bring the deficits down, there is not enough money in the discretionary budget, we all know that. That means more revenues. The President has said that taxes won’t go up for any Americans earning under $250,000, but it doesn’t appear that he’s going to be able to keep that promise if you’re going to bring the deficits down.

GEITHNER: George, we can’t make these judgments yet about what exactly it’s going to take and we’re going to get there. But the very important thing, and no one is going to care about this more than the President of the United States, is for people to understand that we do not have a choice as a country, that if we want an economy that is going to grow in the future, people have to understand that we have to bring those deficits down. And it’s gonna, it’s going to difficult — hard for us to do and the path to that is through health care reform. But that’s necessary but not sufficient. We [are] going to do some other things too.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So revenues are on the table, as well?

GEITHNER: Again, we’re not at the point yet where we’re going to make a judgment about what it’s going to take. But the important thing —

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you’re not ruling it out, you can’t rule it out.

GEITHNER: I think what the country needs to do is understand we’re going to have to do what it takes, we’re going to do what’s necessary.

Everyone in Washington knows what Secretary Geithner means when he says “we’re going to do what’s necessary.” His apparent equivocations are simply intended to provide the usual deniability for politicians with reelection campaigns to run. 

Tax increases are coming!