On August 2, 2011, President Obama signed perhaps one of the most contentious piece of legislation in recent history (if you discount last year’s health care bill). There has been no shortage of opinion as to what the results would have been had the bill to raise the debt limit not passed. In the past weeks, ideologues on both sides of the aisle promised the end of the world if 1) the debt limit wasn’t increased and 2) spending wasn’t capped. No one disagreed that these two things needed to happen, but all disagreed on how to accomplish this shared goal.
Because I suspect regular readers already have a sense of my political leanings, I would not have bothered to comment on our national debacle except that a CNN opinion piece from retired Lt.General Russel Honoré caught my eye. Honoré expressed his frustration with our elected leaders by calling for all of them to be shipped off to a boot camp at Camp Shelby, Mississippi and to stay there until they understood teamwork and sacrifice among other things. I’ll be honest. Honoré’s solution appeals to me emotionally on many levels despite being illegal and impractical. Of the more than 1500 comments on the article, more than 85% are in support which taps into the general feeling that our legislators are out of touch with the electorate and embarrassed us nationally last week.
Now, I would not have even mentioned Honoré’s opinion piece except it was answered by a Colonel Paul Yingling who argued that the fiasco we Americans witnessed was what the founding fathers intended and that Honoré is calling for “political re-education camps.” Yingling goes on to state that James Madison, considered the Father of the Constitution by many, would have welcomed this partisan brinksmanship display as the price of liberty.
To both men, I say I understand the importance of standing for something as opposed to standing for nothing. I do not, however, understand a thought process which says committing national fiscal suicide if one doesn’t get their way is mature and purposeful behavior. The bottom line is that our representatives didn’t serve the nation well last week and maybe a “time-out” similar to what one gives a misbehaving child is needed. What Honoré called for is illegal, but it voices a shared frustration that our leaders acted like children and should be treated as such. Finally, I would remind Colonel Yingling that if someone had given Vice President Aaron Burr a “time out,” he might not have killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over a political dispute despite what the founding fathers intended. But then again, maybe to Colonel Yingling, that too is the price of liberty.