Two institutional items from yesterday:

1. It’s baaa-ack. House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan and Ranking Member Van Hollen introduced a bill yesterday (H.R. 3521) to give the President a  line-item veto over appropriations legislation. Since the statutory line item veto legislation (P.L. 104-30) enacted in 1996 was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1998, the Ryan/Van Hollen bill is technically a process known as “expedited rescission.” It doesn’t directly give the President the power to veto parts of a bill; instead, it allows the President to propose line-item rescissions to any spending bill for 45 days after the bill becomes law, with the proposed rescissions getting fast-track authority for an up-down vote in Congress. The President would also have authority to not obligate the funds while the rescissions were adjudicated. Two versions of expedited rescission are plausible: one in which both chambers of Congress must approve the rescissions for them to go into effect, another in which they go into effect automatically unless one (or both) chambers disapprove. The new bill is of the former variety.

Expedited rescission seems constitutional on its face, but just as bad an idea as the traditional line-item veto. The main problem is still the same: there’s a major political power transfer from Congress to the President, without any guarantee that the result will be budgetary savings. It just fundamentally changes the veto-bargaining. With the power to cancel pieces of a bill, the President gains significant leverage over each individual Member, all of whom must live in fear of the White House slashing their favorite appropriations. This leverage could (and would) be used by the White House across all policy areas, spending or otherwise, as the President used threats of appropriations cuts to buy up votes for his position on any bill being considered, be it a bill to cut spending, increase spending, or make social policy. A related secondary problem is that congressional leaders might have a harder time cutting deals on appropriations bills, given that they wouldn’t be able to credibly commit to language with the possibility of Presidential rescissions looming in the future.

In the 90’s, the Supreme Court was able to save Congress from itself on the matter. This time, that out would not be available. In fact, once this power is given to the President, the ratcheting-up problem (in which Congress can give the President increased power by majority, but can only rescind it over veto by 2/3 supermajority) means  it’s probably not coming back. Some people might mollify themselves that expedited rescission still leaves the power in the hands of Congress and doesn’t give away the whole store to the President. Maybe so, but it still gives away a lot of it. How much support will Members be able to muster to reject an up/down vote on a spending item that the President is publicly saying must go? Perhaps some. But probably not enough to make Members feel secure in the face of White House pressure and threats.

2. Allowed vs. Required. There was an excellent debate on the Senate floor yesterday over Senate Amendment 1126 to S. 1867, the FY12 Defense Authorization Act, which followed a similar debate on SA 1107 (which failed 38-60 on Tuesday). Here’s the text of SA 1126:

On page 360, between lines 21 and 22, insert the following:

(e) Applicability to Citizens.–The authority described in this section for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain a person does not include the authority to detain a citizen of the United States without trial until the end of the hostilities.

You can imagine the liberty vs. security debate that ensued, and I recommend watching some of it on C-SPAN. (The primary debaters were Sens. Kirk, Lee, Graham, Levin, and Durbin). There’s also lots of good commentary out there, and I’d start with this Slate piece, mostly because it has just a ton of links in it.

One thing that struck me from the debate is that a lot of the arguments implicitly gave the Supreme Court more authority than it actually has within the Constitutional system. For example, much of the argument against the amendment relied on the idea that the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of indefinite detention for enemy combatants, while the proponents of the law tended to attack this argument by either (a) denying that the court had extended that logic to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil or (b) implicitly arguing that the Court was misreading the plain text of the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments. In any case, much of the back and forth concerned how to interpret the Court’s ruling in Hamdi v. Rumself and other relevant decision.

This largely puts the horse before the cart. When the Supreme Court upholds a statute as constitutional, they are merely ruling on its permissibility under the Constitution, not on its wisdom and certainly not that it is required under the Constitution. The wisdom of individual pieces of legislation — and the Court often says as much in its decisions — is not its concern.A statute struck down by the Court might be the greatest or most well-intended idea since sliced bread, and a statute upheld may be the worst injustice known to man or borne of bad motivations. It’s nice when that’s not the case, and bad laws are struck down (see line-item veto, above) and good ones upheld (ex. 1964 Civil Rights Act), but it’s just as often the case that unwise policies are constitutional (see Korematsu v. United States) and well-intentioned laws are not (see  Lopez v. United States).

But while the wisdom of laws is not the Court concern, it is precisely Congress’s concern. And this is where yesterday’s debate was somewhat lacking. The proponents of the amendment argued at length that the non-amended policy in the bill was unconstitutional and the opponents of the amendment argued that it was constitutional, but precious little time was spent on the issue of whether indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, whether constitutional or not, was good policy. News flash: the Courts did not set up the military tribunal system. The Courts did not write the statues granting presidential authority in the war on terror. And the Courts do not write the laws regarding indefinite detention. Congress does. It’s simple but often lost: if Congress wants to give the President the power to indefinitely detain U.S. Citizens, then can write a law that is subject to Court review of its constitutionality. But if Congress wants to repeal such a law, or not write one in the first place, they have absolute sovereign authority to do so, and no Court has the power to change that.

Now, there was a strand of the debate yesterday that seemed to take issue with this, on the following theory: Congress has the responsibility to do whatever it can to protect the country, and therefore must give the President every bit of power that it allowed under the Constitution. Therefore, whatever the outer-limits of what the Court allows is what we should do. In other words, the wisest policy is simply the maximum security policy allowed under the Bill of Rights. I reject this argument on both policy and principle grounds. On policy grounds, it’s a strawman: no one is honestly proposing that Congress do everything it (practically) can for national security. That would involve massive increases in the number of federal agents, things like cameras on tons of public street corners, massive restrictions on entry visas, and so forth. There are obviously trade-offs being made in the security debate, and therefore, because we are not simply interested in doing the maximum possible bar none, the wisdom of any individual policy is worthy of consideration.

But more importantly, I reject the argument on principle, because it makes life too easy on Congress. The Supreme Court should not be a crutch on which to lean policy positions.** Nor is the constitutionality of a policy position under the Bill of Rights the end of discussion about liberty concerns within a policy. To understand policymaking that way would let Congress off the hook for the responsibility for its own choices.  Now, I don’t want to sound like some weak-kneed liberal here. I’m not. But I do think that there is room for discussion of the constitution in a debate about the wisdom of a policy that is, on the legal merits, utterly constitutional. That may sound odd, and I certainly don’t want to reduce it to some sort of “spirit of the Founders intent” nonsense, but I think it’s both necessary and practical. I’m not arguing for sovereign congressional interpretation of the Constitution, but I am arguing for the idea that policies can be constitutional in a legal sense and at the same time be unwise precisely because they seem antithetical to the spirit of the constitution.

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**One place this will undoubtedly turn up is in next year’s SCOTUS decision about the health care mandate. There are two unknown truths about the mandate: it’s either a good idea or a bad idea, and it’s either constitutional or unconstitutional. But knowing one tells you nothing about the other. Just as it’s not constitutional simply because it’s a good idea, it’s not a good idea simply because it’s constitutional. Unfortunately, in the wake of the decision, I think a lot of the wisdom of the policy is going to be read into its determined constitutionality, regardless of which way the decision goes.