The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)

In my posts entitled: "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)" and "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)" I set forth an analysis showing that the urgency of the deficit has deliberately been exaggerated, for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to use it as a wedge to decimate all the protection that we have built up, not only from the deprivations of our senior years, but from all the threats that modern technology, if unchecked, subjects us to. Many of these, such as the FDA keep our food and drugs safe, or the EPA which keeps our water and our air from being ever more contaminated, the SEC that keeps our securities safe from rigging (at least when properly funded and properly headed) than it is. I could go on and on, but let me mention a few more such as our schools and libraries, our National Parks, our National monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial. Or the agencies that are supposed to prevent oil spill disasters, such as the Valdez spill in Alaska, or the more recent one in the Gulf of Mexico. Even our safety in riding an interstate bus depends on Federal Regulation, which the recent fatal bus crash in the Bronx dramatically reminds us.

They all need adequate funding and inadequate funding, which I am afraid is what is happening in the cuts that are quietly being agreed to, will decimate the protections on which we depend.

But let me address the elephants in the room: Social Security and Medicare. If you think the attempt to end Medicare and Social Security is something that Republicans feel is necessary to solve the deficit think again. It has been their goal since at even before the Administration of Ronald Reagan, who before he became President denounced the then incipient passage of Medicare with the following:

We do not want socialized medicine…behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Norman Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism…We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” He went on to say: “The doctor begins to lose freedoms, it’s like telling a lie. One leads to another. First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors are equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him he can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

(Emphasis added)

You can find both the quote and a video of the speech here.

When Reagan became President he became somewhat of a pragmatist and, as far as I can find made no effort to have Medicare repealed. In fact, despite his rhetoric on Social Security where he had scorned Social Security as “as an involuntary, quasi-socialistic example of government running amok” and argued, in a nationally televised 1964 speech for GOP candidate Barry Goldwater, that Social Security should become a "voluntary" program. But as President he made an agreement with Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. It raised the payroll tax, it raised the retirement age from 65 to 67 to be phased in by 2027; it required government employees to pay into Social Security for the first time; and beginning in 1984, includes up to one-half of Social Security benefits as taxable income for taxpayers whose adjusted gross income, combined with half their benefits and any tax-exempt interest they may have exceeds $25,000 for a single taxpayer and $32,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly. Benefits received by married taxpayers filing separately are taxable without regard to other income. Appropriates amounts equal to estimated tax liability to the Social Security trust funds. These reforms extended the life of Social Security by many decades.

But this sort of compromise is not one the new inflexible ideologues of the Republican Party are seeking. George W. Bush proposed in 2005 doing away with Social Security and substitute for it private investment accounts. “While the White House has helped convince more than two-thirds of those polled that Social Security is heading for a crisis or possible bankruptcy without change, 56 percent disapprove(d) of his approach…” wrote the Washington Post in March of 2005 The proposal went nowhere.

So it was obvious that the determination to abolish all that had been accomplished by Roosevelt –Social Security; by Lyndon Johnson - Medicare and Medicaid, by their own Richard Nixon –the EPA and all the other programs, e.g. Theodore Roosevelt – Food and Drug Administration or our under funded National Parks the first of which having been created in 1896 under the Administration of Ulysses S. Grant, would, if they have not already been, be either abolished or have their funding severely cut. Rahm Emanuel once said” You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," but here there is a desire not only to take advantage of a crisis, but one that doesn’t really exist, and that to the extent that it does, was deliberately created by them, for the very purpose of finding a rationale, an excuse, to do what the public would not otherwise let them.

In case anyone doubts that even our National Parks and all conservation efforts are under attack, see what the non-partisan Wilderness Society has to say or regarding the arts and NEA funding see Advocate For The Arts.

Every decent program conceived by either party in years past, before the Republican Party became an irresponsible radical party, is endangered.

But before I close, and despite the risks of making this too, long allow me to revert to my last post: “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)” where I quote from the Economist.

I believe this quote is so important that with your indulgence I will repeat it here:

Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programs for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is rooted in class.

Yes, the conservative, Economist, is more inclined to tell it the way it is than the so-called “liberal” and so called “un-biased press.”

This struck me last Friday night when I listened to the highly respected PBS program Washington Week where in their endeavor to sound non-Partisan, they ended up explaining nothing and made this epical battle over the future of our country sound like a squabble between of playground kids, or as though, or at best, it was a sporting event. Worse of all, when they finally, did concede that great philosophical divides are what drives the power play, they defined it as, “Big government vs. Small Government” which is exactly the way Tea Party members, and indeed Republicans in general, would like to define it, for in polls when the issues are defined that way Republicans win, while if it is defined as specific programs that are endangered, from Medicare, to SS, to our clean air, water, etc. Democrats win. Thus as the Economist points out, we do not have to look for “Fox News” to find a “disparate treatment… rooted in class.”

It is very discouraging that we can not find unbiased reporting on such an important subject even on PBS – or are they too worried about funding from the Republican Congress and Corporate underwriters.

Again in order not to make this unduly long I will, in my next post, “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part IV)” review how they planned, nay, plotted to create this crisis for the very purpose of gutting all these programs.

The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)

In my recent post “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)” I pointed out that (1) the urgency of the deficit is a hoax (2) that the Republicans deliberately created it (3) that they created it as an excuse for decimating and even abolishing all the accomplishments of numerous Administrations, both Republican and Democratic and (4) that merely allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would go a long way toward reducing the deficit.

Allow me to elaborate on this with additional facts.

As the Republican/Bush tax cuts turned the Democratic/Clinton surplus into a large Republican deficit our then Vice-President Dick Cheney said, "Deficits don't matter.”

On August 5, 2009 Forbes, hardly a liberal publication reported:

Still, Cheney was true to his word, as the White House of George W. Bush raised the federal deficit every year it was in office. When Bush started his presidency, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product hovered at 60%. By the time he exited, it was closer to 80%.

(The National Debt is the total amount of debt incurred since the founding of the Republic. The Federal Deficit is the amount of debt incurred during a given year.)

Well, I guess Republicans can change their minds, can’t they. Maybe they realized they were wrong and deficits are a threat to the American economy. Well, they came up with the Ryan budget, which abolishes Medicare, and with an almost straight party line vote passed their own budget, because that is necessary to balance the budget. Really!! Guess what?

On April 22, 2011 The Economist, hardly a liberal publication, had this to say:

Mr Ryan's plan adds (by its own claims) $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, but promises to balance the budget by sometime in the 2030s by cutting programmes for the poor and the elderly. The Progressive Caucus's plan would (by its own claims) balance the budget by 2021 by cutting defence spending and raising taxes, mainly on rich people. Mr Ryan has been fulsomely praised for his courage. The Progressive Caucus has not.

I'm not really sure what "courage" is supposed to mean here, but this seems precisely backwards. For 30 years, certainly since Walter Mondale got creamed by Ronald Reagan, the most dangerous thing a politician can do has been to call for tax hikes. Politicians who call for higher taxes are punished, which is why they don't do it. I'm curious to see what adjectives people would apply to the Progressive Congressional Caucus's budget proposal. But it's hard for me to imagine the media calling a proposal to raise taxes "courageous" and "honest". And my sense is that the disparate treatment here is a structural bias rooted in class.

Yes, the conservative Economist is more inclined to tell it the way it is than the so-called “liberal” and so called “un-biased press.”

Even Charles Krauthammer, that beacon of the Right, writing in the Washington Post:

You cannot govern this country from one house. Republicans should have learned that from the 1995-96 Gingrich-Clinton fight when the GOP controlled both houses and still lost.

If conservatives really want to get the nation’s spending under control, the only way is to win the presidency. Put the question to the country and let the people decide. To seriously jeopardize the election now in pursuit of a long-term, small-government, Ryan-like reform that is inherently unreachable without control of the White House may be good for the soul. But it could very well wreck the cause.

Please note that he is not worried about wrecking the country, only wrecking, “The Cause”

He then inadvertently exposes his own hypocrisy by advocating:

…tax reform along the lines of the Simpson-Bowles commission that, in one option, strips out annually $1.1 trillion of deductions, credits and loopholes while lowering tax rates across the board to a top rate of 23 percent.

Which is exactly what, among other things, Republicans have been opposing, because it would increase revenues, something they are adamantly opposed to.

In order to keep this post within reasonable length, I will address other aspects in my next post, which will be named “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part III)”

The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part I)

This is undoubtedly a startling statement to make in the light of all that is coming out of Washington and from our media. But the statement is absolutely true.

We have stopped questioning the urgency of resolving the deficit because we have now been pounded with this proposition for many month, more than a year, by the media, by the Republican Party, and now even by our Democratic President.

But none of this makes it true! Well it is fair to ask, if it is not true then why are all these sources more or less on the same page. I submit that each has its own rationale.

Republicans have created most of this deficit and are now trying to panic the country into dealing with it by draconian cuts, I submit with deliberate intent to justify their long sought goal of decimating all the social programs and regulations, going back not only to Franklyn Roosevelt, but even to his Republican namesake, Theodore Roosevelt, who was President from 1901 to 1909.

The media because in part they slavishly report what any political mouthpiece declares without questioning its validity, and in part because much of the media is the mouthpiece of the Republican party, such as the media empire of Rupert Murdoch e.g. in New York City of Fox News, The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal to mention just a few and the rest because it is safer to go along then to strike an independent course.

And finally, the President, because once this has become a truism in the public mind, it is political suicide to try to oppose it.

But those of us who try to go beyond the “common wisdom” can, and indeed should, always question that which has become accepted by constant repetition.


In fact many articles have been written raising questions, but I will refer to one in particular because it is not a political one, but appeared in a stock market advisory letter published by Fidelity Monitor in its May 2011 issue.

I quote the pertinent portions of the article:

Predictions of doom and gloom have become the latest sensation. Media hounds tell us the Federal debt will grow unchecked. Inflation will surge. Foreigners will unload treasuries. The dollar will crash. From the pundit’s point of view, bold predictions get you air time. And if you’ve made a number of wrong predictions, like PIMCO manager Bill Gross has, you’ve got nothing to lose by throwing another one out there. Especially if the publicity helps bring new money into your bond fund...

A high level of government debt, by itself, is not enough to cause a currency to collapse – if it was, the yen would have gone bust over a decade ago…

But the doom and gloomers seem convinced that Congress will remain gridlocked for the next 20 years while deficits grow unchecked. Even if that’s what ends up happening, it still may not necessarily tank the dollar. It would probably take a decade for the Federal debt to reach 200% of GDP (comparable to what Japan has now). By then, a positive trade balance could make it relatively easy to finance with domestic capital, just as Japan does…

The newsletter industry has it own cadre of doom and gloomers. Some have been perma-bears since the 1970s. The Hulbert Financial Digest has tracked some of these guys throughout the years, and they have horrible track records. Fear, it turns out, does wonders for selling books and attracting television viewers, but in the long run it destroys value.

Once you embrace a doom and gloom theory, there can only be a bad outcome. Sooner or later, conditions improve, and your portfolio misses out on the rewards that come with a solid investment strategy.

For the full article see here.

Now let me address my assertion that Republicans have created most of this deficit. In 1992 at the end of the G.H.W. Bush Presidency, the deficit stood at 300 billion dollars. By the end of the Clinton Presidency in 2000 we had surplus of in excess of 200 billion dollars. At the end of the G. W. Bush Presidency in 2008 we had a deficit in excess 400 billion dollars and a recession bordering on a ’29 depression to boot.

To be sure, as Republicans have claimed, the deficit accelerated markedly during the first year of the Obama Presidency, but of course the recession cut tax receipts markedly and required substantial additional outlays, but despite this, the Council on Foreign Relations, as can be seen from the chart above, projected a substantial decrease in the deficit in the years to come, based not on a cut in expenditures, but on the assumption that the Bush tax cuts would not be renewed, which as a result of the Obama compromise with Republicans did not occur. But if nothing else it shows how canceling the Bush tax cuts would by itself have made a major dent in the deficit without any cuts. This, I believe was a major blunder on the part of the Administration and one that I cannot understand.

But let me be clear! The deficit does matter! It needs to be reduced over time. But there is no urgency about doing this, and it can, and should be done with some targeted cuts, which I will identify hereafter, and with mostly revenue enhancement.

But I have up to this point not adequately covered my contention that the deficit was created with deliberate intent to justify their long sought goal of decimating all the social programs, as well as regulations that benefit the general public, going back not only to Franklin Roosevelt, but even to his Republican namesake, Theodore Roosevelt, who was President from 1901 to 1909. In order to keep this post within reasonable length, I will address this in my next post, which will be named “The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part II)”

Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution - Discussion II

Pam Tisza responded to my post: Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution with a comment that was not entirely on point, but was sufficiently timely for me to publish it with my comments thereon. She wrote:

There are so many horrible things happening, and your blogs make me feel as if there is someone in this world thinking. I am very upset about the many restrictions to voting that are being passed in so many states. Do you have any thoughts on the subject, AND any suggestions for counteracting this gross attempt to return to the era of the poll tax without a tax???

I had actually been following this development with some dismay, and so it was with alacrity that I responded as follows:

You are quite right about Republican activities of voter suppression. But this has been their tactic for a very long time and not enough denunciation has ben directed against it.

One might have hoped that the courts would hold this to be a constitutional right, under the due process clause or the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to the Constitution which provides that: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," but the US Supreme Court in CRAWFORD et al. v. MARION COUNTY ELECTION BOARD et al. decided otherwise in 2008 voting by a 7 to 3 majority that there was no infringement

At least as early as the 1992 election for New Jersey governor, which was won by Republican Christie Whitman, Ed Rollins, the then prominent Republican campaign consultant bragged in a Time Magazine article that:

..."street smart" New Jersey Republicans had doled out $500,000 in "walking-around money" to black ministers and Democratic Party activists on Whitman's behalf. But in this case the payments were actually sitting- around money, designed to counter Florio's heavy support among black voters by discouraging them from turning out on Election Day. As Rollins told the journalists, "We went into black churches and we basically said to ministers who had endorsed Florio, 'Do you have a special project?' And they said, 'We've already endorsed Florio.' We said, 'That's fine -- don't get up on the Sunday pulpit and preach. We know you've endorsed him, but don't get up there and say it's your moral obligation that you go on Tuesday to vote for Jim Florio.' " He added that Republicans had paid "key workers" in black Democratic strongholds to "go home, sit and watch television" instead of delivering voters to the polls. Bragged Rollins: "I think to a certain extent we suppressed their vote.

In the 2004 election the following was reported by The NewStandard:

News surfaced Tuesday evening that the Bush campaign's Florida office has a list of the names and addresses of 1,886 voters in and around Jacksonville, Florida, a predominately black city inside Duval County, where official voter registration figures show Democrats have a nearly 50,000 person edge over Republicans.

In an October 26 broadcast of the BBC's Newsnight, investigative journalist Greg Palast reported that Florida Bush/Cheney campaign officials are keeping a spreadsheet they call a 'caging list". The broadcast included portions of an interview with Ion Sancho, the Leon County election supervisor who headed up statewide recount efforts on the orders of the Florida Supreme Court back in 2000. Sancho has raised the possibility that the "caging list" will be used to challenge the eligibility of voters at the polls, an action permitted by an arcane law passed in 1895.

During an interview with The NewStandard, Sancho called the legislation "a holdover Jim Crow law" and said that challenges based solely on the Republicans' spreadsheet won't be deemed credible in his county.

Also during the 2004 election Representative Dennis Kucinich commented on allegations of voter suppression in Ohio during the 2004 election:

Dirty tricks occurred across the state, including phony letters from Boards of Elections telling people that their registration through some Democratic activist groups were invalid and that Kerry voters were to report on Wednesday because of massive voter turnout. Phone calls to voters giving them erroneous polling information were also common.

John Pappageorge, a Republican state legislator in Michigan said in the summer of 2004:

'If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election.

Pappageorge later asserted he was quoted out of context stating, "In the context that we were talking about, I said we’ve got to get the vote up in Oakland (County) and the vote down in Detroit. You get it down with a good message."

In September of 2009 ACORN, a community organization dedicated among other things to getting as many minority voters as possibly registered to vote was destroyed by setting a trap or as the Metro New York Labor Communication Council described it:

A pimp and his prostitute walked into an ACORN office — hidden cameras somewhere — and snookered, after considerable editing, two ACORN employees into telling them how to evade taxes on the work they were doing. Fox News took it up, followed by the more “respectable” media. A bandwagon of horrified conservatives and liberal congressional representatives, and a president, took to the low road– and an organization that did more for people needing housing than ever before, and registered more than 1.3 million poor people and people of color to vote, was knocked off the road; consigned to the scrapheap of history.

A cartoon on that web site summarized it very well:

This year I have received e-mails from various sources such as from Governor Martin O'Malley reading, "Maine is the newest addition to our growing list of states that are playing recklessly with voters’ rights. The Republican-controlled legislature just passed a bill to end same-day registration and make it harder for people to cast their ballots, and the Tea Party-backed Republican governor is ready to sign it into law."

The non-partisan League of Women Voters complained about: "...a surprise move, the House leadership has scheduled a vote this Wednesday, June 22, on legislation to abolish the Election Assistance Commission, HR 672. With many continuing threats to the right to vote, now is not the time to terminate the only federal agency that devotes its full resources and attention to improving our elections."

And from Florida I got the following: "The GOP-led Florida Legislature just passed a terrible bill that will make it harder for people to register to vote and limit early voting. Conveniently enough, these new rules target Democratic voters, and they come just in time to have a disastrous effect on the 2012 election."

And finally in another message from the League of Women Voters they wrote: "More than 2/3 of states have passed or are considering laws that would make it harder for people to vote. Because of ONE case of voter fraud in 6 years, a new law disenfranchises 620,000 Kansas residents who lack government ID. An "emergency" Texas bill does not consider student IDs valid IDs to vote, but will allow anyone with a handgun license to vote."

The only recourse good government forces have against this onslaught, since apparently the courts will not take action, is to publicize these outrages.

I continue to be disappointed by the New York Times, which even as this problem escalates has not seen fit to address it in its news pages. The last time that I can find any reference to this problem in the Times News section was in October of 2010 and then it turned it on its head with the headline: "Fraudulent Voting Re-emerges as a Partisan Issue," though in its editorial pages it spoke loud and clear on June 11 of this year. As far as I am concerned it is the News section that defines a paper and not its Editoral Page.

Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution - Discussion I

Dr. Louise Mayo, History professor emeritus of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania reacted to my post on "Perpetuating False Myths - The US Constitution" with this exposition:

Your history is largely right on, but I think that you are not entirely fair to the New York Times article and not as nuanced as the real story is.  The article does not really say that the founders wanted a weaker government than the Articles of Confederation, but it does, largely correctly, point out that there was fear about one branch of government becoming too powerful, hence the elaborate system of checks and balances.  Indeed the writers of the Constitution rejected (unfortunately in my opinion) a parliamentary system in which there is for the most part a single branch.  Under that system, which exists in most of Europe, the party that is elected has the power to enact the basic legislation it has promised the voters that it would. The minority cannot block the measures introduced by the majority. (Of course the fly in the ointment occurs when there are three or more parties, making compromises and deals essential.)  Had we such a system here when Obama and the Democrats won big majorities in 2008, they could have passed their program without any real problems or much compromise.  That is not to argue that the Republicans in the Senate are following constitutional precedent when they, while still in the minority, successfully block appointments and the executive's ability to carry out laws.  In the past, the unwritten understanding was that a president could have the appointees he wanted who reflected his point of view, with only occasional exceptions. I cannot remember a time in history when the opposition party was so single-mindedly determined to insure that the President fails and uses the bludgeon of threatened filibuster to block just about everything and everyone.

Which I tried to rebut with:

Thank you for your input. I am glad that I provoked you into commenting.

However, I question that the "elaborate checks and balances" were intended to cause gridlock. First I question whether the "Checks and Balances" that the Times and you both refer to were a concept at the convention. I can find nothing in the Constitutional debates that indicates that it intended the Supreme Court to act as a restraint. As a matter of fact, before Marbury vs. Madison was decided it was assumed by President Washington that the Court had no such power and that the veto power was to be used to reject what the President considered unconstitutional.

So aside from the bicameral legislature which I contend was the result of the compromise outlined by me, the only other check or balance is the President's veto. While my reading in this area, I am sure, is not as extensive as yours, I have found nothing to indicate that the bicameral legislature was intended as a check or a balance. I am sure that you are correct that the founders considered a parliamentary system, which I agree would be better than what we have, but I contend it was rejected, not because it would not be enough of a check on power, but rather because it did not satisfy the two faction at the convention, as I stated. Also there was precedence for it in the British system, which had the House of Commons and the House of Lords (bicameral) with the King being the Chief executive, the President in our system.

I keep hearing the words "checks and balances" but I am not even sure that those words were used at the convention. I believe, though, of course, I may be wrong, that this is a modern invention.

As a matter of fact there was great concern that the Constitution gave the federal government too much power; hence the demand for the Bill of Rights, which I grant you was intended to limit the power of the federal government, but that is different from the contention that the Constitution itself was intended to hamstring the government as a way of making sure it does not overstep.

Can you cite anything that would indicate that the bicameral legislature was intended as a check or a balance, rather than the need for compromise as I have argued.

As for doing an injustice to the Times, even if I was wrong here, and I don't concede that I was,  there are many, many instances of the Times feeding into the paradigm of the Right. For example its distorted writing by Judith Miller in support of Iraq war, its slandering of Gore and Kerry and its reluctance to report on Watergate, see e.g: The Media II - Falsehoods about Gore, The Media! (Watergate/Clinton) and The Media III - Falsehoods about Kerry.  I could cite many others and may return to that subject at a later time.

After further research I added:

Since dispatching the message below, I tried to search for any mention of checks and balances in the records of the debates at Philadelphia. I could find none.

I then went to the Federalist Papers where I did find a reference to checks, but not to balances in Federalist No. 51 and where Publius writes:

"First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people."

But I don't find that adequate or convincing proof that the bicameral legislature was intended as a "check and balance" even if possibly Hamilton or Madison used something close to such an argument on its behalf.

As you can see I am perfectly willing to prove myself wrong and will happily (well maybe not happily) concede that I was wrong if any evidence, other than that it is the conventional wisdom even among historians, can be adduced by you or me or anyone else. However, I am always suspicious of conventional wisdom, even if held by a distinguished group, absent convincing evidence.

The discussion concluded with Dr. Mayo's following observations which largely quoted further from Federalist No. 51. Her comments are in parentheses and bold.

So I think this discussion is going in circles.  Here are the relevant sections of Federalist 51:

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconvenience is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. (Idea of 2 branches as checks on each other.)

In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments.

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure (this) method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

(By the way this shows a realization of judicial branch's role) A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges as, a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body.

(The 2 branches of the legislature is not the central point, but it is also clear that one was to represent the people and the other representing the states, as you rightly point out, was also NOT chosen by the people deliberately to provide counter-weight to messy popular "passions.")

Let me conclude with, what has become a somewhat esoteric, though very interesting discussion, by pointing out that Dr. Mayo is unable to quote from the minutes of the convention itself (though of course there were no official minutes, only the recollection of participants at the convention) and neither she nor I can find any reference to this issue in the Federalist Papers except in one out of eighty-five, and this was in an attempt to sell the document, hardly a reliable way to determine the intent of the authors.

But I say the argument is esoteric, because the principal cause of the gridlock, is not the existence of the two Houses, but the use of non-Constutional means to obstruct, most particularly the filibuster and the willingness to cause untold damage to the country, unless its agenda is adopted. In this connection the Times article, whether having a basis or not, feeds into the false paradigm that the problems we have encountered are the results of the structure of our government, rather than the deliberate obstructionism by any and all means of one of our parties.

Perpetuating False Myths: The US Constitution

As the Republican Party continues its campaign to hold the Nation hostage as a means of forcing their radical program down the throats of the American people they depend on the propagation of many myths that serve to justify both their programs and their tactics.

Many of these myths turn around our founding fathers and their intent in the creation of the Constitution. We hear over and over again, until by the mere use of repetition, it becomes a truism, that the purpose of the Constitution was to limit the powers of the Federal government. Nothing could be further from the truth!

At the time that the Constitutional convention was called, the thirteen states that had won independence from Britain, were in a very loose alliance under a document called the Articles of Confederation, which had been agreed to by the Continental Congress on November 15,1777, but which had not been ratified until 1781. The War of Independence ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. The Constitutional Convention convened four years later in 1787, and was convened because the Articles of Confederation did not confer sufficient powers on the Federal government and was causing gridlock. Among its many weaknesses was the fact that it could only be amended by unanimous vote, and that it did not have the power to prevent the states from acting in their own individual interests, instead of in the interests of the whole, e.g., “Rhode Island's imposing taxes on all traffic passing through it on the post road that linked all the states.”

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“Virginian James Madison has been called the Father of the Constitution. He arrived in Philadelphia for the Convention almost two weeks early so that he could start thinking about what he wanted the Convention to accomplish. From his point of view, there were a few main problems with the Confederation. The states were under no obligation to pay their fair share of the national budget; they violated international treaties with abandon; they ran roughshod over the authority of the Congress; and they violated each other's rights incessantly.”

See here.

As can readily be seen, from this history, the founding fathers, and Madison in particular, did not draft the Constitution in order to limit the powers of the Federal Government or to create gridlock, as a front-page article in the New York Times’ Week in Review contends under the title of “Standstill Nation."

The Constitution was intended to do away with the gridlock of the Articles of Confederation, and to decrease the power of the states. Contentions so often heard to the contrary are not only misleading, but downright false. The New York Times, “that paragon of liberalism” is simply playing into the false paradigm promulgated and perpetuated by dint of repetition by the Republican party in order to justify its program of emasculating the Federal government, and in fact emasculating all government, in so far as it tries to serve the vast majority of its citizens who have not been fortunate enough to acquire great wealth.

The New York Times article propounds a notion that in order to create gridlock the Founding Fathers created two Houses. While the existence of two Houses certainly does not further the smooth functioning of government, it is nothing short of silly to suggest that they were created for that purpose. This among many of the other myths propounded ignores the fact that the document was not the product of careful evaluation of all its possible consequences, but rather the product of endless compromise. There were those who felt that the legislative branch should simply be representative of the individual states, and therefore the Senate was created giving each state regardless of its size, two Senators, who were to be selected, not by the people, but by the legislatures of the individual states. See Article I, Section 3 of the US Constitution (This was not changed until 1913 when the 17th Amendment provided for the election of Senators by popular vote.)

Others felt that the people, according to their number, should be in control of the legislature of the United States, and argued for what came to be the House of Representatives.

The creation of the two Houses was the compromise worked out to satisfy these contending factions, not as the Times article contends, to create gridlock. What utter nonsense!!

In any case, today’s gridlock is not so much the result of the existence of the two Houses but rather the result of one of our parties being determined to use parliamentary tactics to thwart the will of the majority, and impose its will on the Nation. Toward this end they have created non-constitutional requirements to pass legislation, having, for example, instituted the 60 vote rule in the Senate, a requirement nowhere to be found in the Constitution. (While the filibuster was used before it became a tool of party policy, it was used only by individuals or small groups, most frequently to thwart civil rights legislation. It was not until fairly recently that it became a tool of one of the major parties, creating a new hitherto unknown requirement of sixty votes to pass any legislation or confirm any Presidential appointment.)

Similarly Tea Partiers and Republicans in general, keep relying on the provisions of the US Constitution and its first ten amendments, totally ignoring the 17 amendments that have followed, unless they happen to favor their agenda. Most particularly, they would like to negate the 14th amendment and take us to an antebellum era. The Civil War was fought, the secessionists and state righters lost, and the 14th amendment is the law of the land, and in so far as it contradicts the provisions of the tenth amendment, it overrides that amendment.

What the Times and other so called liberal newspapers are doing is allowing the "Right" to dismiss any liberal sounding article or columns as just the "usual liberal" views, while taking the many Right wing fulminations that come from the page of the Times as, "even the Times says," making it sound as the ultimate affirmation of falsehoods and myths.

What the media should be doing, is setting the record straight, shining a light on truth, and exposing lies, instead of trying to prove its non-partisanship and its non-liberal bona fides by propounding lies and feeding into the myths that support the agenda of one party and a fanatical group of radicals trying to impose their will by non-Constitutional and reckless means.