Placing responsibility on them for the consequences of their decisions will change how they legislate. I will not attempt to forecast those changes, let alone show that they are good. Voters will decide. That is how things should be with a government that derives its “just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” What I will show is that were voters no longer fooled by the Five Tricks, they would act more wisely.
• Chapter 2 explains how Congress is supposed to and did work for a century and half.
• Chapter 3 describes the beginnings of the trickery in the 1960s and ’70s.
• Chapter 4 explains the four tricks that Congress uses in making domestic policy (the Money Trick, the Debt Guarantee Trick, the Federal Mandate Trick, and the Regulation Trick) and how Congress came to get away with using them.
• Chapter 5 shows how these tricks harm us now.
• Chapter 6 shows that these tricks cannot continue indefinitely, because, unless stopped, they will eventually bring ruin.
• Chapter 7 explains the War Trick.
• Chapter 8 proposes a statute that would stop the Five Tricks: the “Honest Deal Act.”
• Chapter 9 shows how voters could get Congress to pass the Honest Deal Act.
How Congress Is Supposed to Work—and Long Did
The people who met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to draft a constitution for the United States faced a formidable challenge. They knew that most new democracies ended in tyranny or anarchy.1 Yet, they designed a system of government that pleased most Americans until 1964. That year, as described in the introduction, an overwhelming majority still trusted our government to do “the right thing.” Yet, today most Americans distrust the federal government.
The drafters of the Constitution pinned their hopes for the new government upon representatives in Congress taking personal responsibility for critical policy choices. This would make them accountable at the polls for the consequences. The legislators’ accountability would force them to engage in open debate about those consequences.
Insight into the value of open debate can be gained by considering—strange as it may seem—how honeybees choose a new home. If a bee colony in the wild is thriving in the late spring or early summer, the queen bee and about ten thousand companions will depart from the hive in a swarm, leaving their original hive to the bees (and a new queen) that stay behind. That is how bee colonies multiply. The swarm will alight on a nearby tree branch and then choose a site for their new hive.
William Shakespeare suggested in Henry V that the queen bee rules her colony in the same way as a human monarch rules a country; the bard notwithstanding, monarchy is not how the bees pick a home.2 The queen bee plays no part. If she were to be injured house hunting, the colony would perish. So, like American revolutionaries who rejected rule by a king, in locating their new hives honeybees must have a workable alternative to monarchy because making a smart choice is critical to survival.3
The bee colony leaves picking a new hive to several hundred worker bees. They spread out for miles in every direction to scout for potential sites. Each scout inspects a site, returns to the swarm, and performs a dance that communicates the location of the potential site and the bee’s degree of enthusiasm for it. Yet, the colony cannot simply opt for the site that draws the highest praise from an individual scout. The scouts vary in how much enthusiasm they show for the same site. That is understandable. The suitability of a site depends on many considerations, some of which are difficult to assess. For example, the hive’s interior must be big enough to store sufficient honey to keep the colony from starving over the winter but not so big that the bees can’t fight off the cold by huddling together. The hive’s entrance must also be small enough to bar raccoons and other honey thieves from entering. The small entrance means the scouts must estimate the honey-storing capacity of the interior in the dark.
While the colony cannot leave the choice up to a single scout, it cannot have every scout visit every potential site, either. The colony would starve before that could happen.
Here’s how the honeybees solve their problem of self-government: After the returning scouts initially report back to the group, they visit sites the other scouts have gone to, especially those that previously drew high praise from the others. When the number of scouts at a site showing enthusiasm for it reaches a threshold of around thirty, that site it is. These scouts communicate the decision to the swarm, which then flies to its new home.
Scientists have found that the bees’ method strikes a smart balance between the care needed to pick an excellent site and the speed needed to keep the colony from weakening from hunger while waiting. Evolution thus equipped honeybees with a smart search engine long before computer engineers ever wrote code for searching the Internet.
The genius of the honeybees’ search engine lies in using open debate about the comparative quality of competing alternatives to increase the group’s collective information, thereby overcoming a daunting set of difficulties including:
• many alternative sites
• multiple considerations applicable to making the choice
• many community members, without a single bee that can gather all the relevant facts in the time available and with many bees evaluating the same facts differently
The people of the United States would face analogous difficulties, as the drafters of the Constitution knew.
Yet people differ from the honeybees in a way that compounds these difficulties. Humans compete with one another for advantage and so have clashing interests. During the drafting of the Constitution, James Madison described the clashing-interest groups as “rich & poor, debtors & creditors, the landed, the manufacturing, the commercial interests, the inhabitants of this district or that district, the followers of this political leader or that political leader, the disciples of this religious Sect or that religious Sect.”4 In contrast, worker bees within a colony don’t compete. Evolution has seen to that because only through the colony’s queen can individual workers propagate their genes.
It’s human nature for voters to want government to further their own interests, for elected legislators seeking their own advancement to attempt to gratify such wants, and for both groups to tend to ignore the burdens that exchanging votes for benefits imposes on other people.
To deal with this whole array of difficulties, the drafters of the Constitution saw open debate as essential. The Constitution contains two features mutually designed to promote such debate. First, it gives responsibility for critical policy choices to a group called Congress, so named because it is a coming together (or congress) of members elected by widely varied interests. It assigns to this Congress the power to levy taxes, appropriate money, impose laws, declare war, and more. Second, the Constitution requires Congress to publish “the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House” on controversial issues. In contrast, in Britain, members of Parliament were allowed to keep their doings secret, thereby shielding them from responsibility.5 These two features of the Constitution, together with the original expectation that Congress would legislate in a way that made benefits and burdens apparent, meant that voters could hold legislators accountable for the consequences of their choices.
The personal responsibility of members of Congress would tend to generate open debate.