Crossing the Rubicon: The Bipartisan Deficit
"Crossing the Rubicon" is a familiar phrase. It refers to the decision of General Julius Caesar in 49 BC to lead his 13th legion back into Italy. This violated Roman law.
The Rubicon was little more than a stream in northern Italy. It served as a legal barrier against any Roman legion returning as a unit to Rome under the command of a governor-general, which Caesar had been in southern Gaul. Caesar's act constituted an act of treason or revolution. It was a capital crime. It launched the civil war, which Caesar won. The Roman Republic fell. The Empire began.
There has been no obvious comparable act of transition from a republic to empire in the United States. Even today, few voters understand that the transition is behind us. I date it with the Spanish-American War in 1898. The U.S. government gained control over the remnants of the Spanish empire, most notably the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
In 1938, Garet Garrett wrote The Revolution Was. His essay began with these momentous paragraphs.
There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state."
This was a key idea: the revolution within the form.
THE FEDERAL DEFICIT
On the matter of the federal deficit, America long ago crossed the Rubicon. The deficit is now completely bipartisan.
I date the transition with Ricard Nixon's back-to-back deficits of $25 billion, 1969 and 1970, followed by his unilateral annulment of the last trace of the gold standard on August 15, 1971. The United States government would henceforth not deliver gold to other central banks at $35 per ounce. He "closed the gold window." That decision was what persuaded Ron Paul to run for Congress in 1974. He won a special election in April 1976. I joined his staff in June.
If Nixon crossed the fiscal Rubicon, then Ronald Reagan was victorious in the resulting civil war. His years of $200 billion deficits began in 1983. They ended the myth that the Republican Party is fiscally conservative.
Yesterday, the Republican-controlled Congress got bipartisan support for a continuing resolution of the budget that is expected to produce a $955 billion deficit in this fiscal year, which will end on September 30. It is expected to produce back-to-back trillion dollar deficits in fiscal 2019 and 2020. In the Senate, the vote was 71 to 28. It came shortly before 2 AM. The vote had been delayed by Sen. Rand Paul.
The bill was immediately sent to the House of Representatives. Before dawn, it was passed by a vote of 240 to 186. The Democrats voted as follows: 119 against, 67 for. The Washington Post assessed the House vote as follows.
Republican leaders, who have typically emerged from spending battles facing questions about divisions in their own party, were more than pleased to observe the Democratic split.“They had a bad strategy when they came up with this idea in December, and they have been fractured ever since,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the GOP’s chief deputy whip. “To me, it’s a fascinating display of a bipartisan win and at the same time, Democrats ripping themselves apart about a bipartisan agreement. It doesn’t make any damn sense.”
In his speech to the Senate, Paul laid it on the line. This is a bipartisan disaster. "Now we have Republicans hand in hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits. I can’t in ... good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits. Really who is to blame? Both parties."
Astoundingly, The Washington Post ran an article that acknowledges Paul's principled commitment.
THE BIG IDEA: Republicans are all Keynesians now, but not Rand Paul.As he forced a brief government shutdown overnight to draw attention to his party’s hypocrisy on deficit spending, Kentucky’s junior senator was the personification of William F. Buckley’s definition of conservatism: standing athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
“I ran for office because I was very critical of [Barack] Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits. Now we have Republicans hand-in-hand with Democrats offering us trillion-dollar deficits,” Paul said during a floor speech, as he predicted that “a day of reckoning” is coming. “I can’t in all good honesty, in all good faith, just look the other way because my party is now complicit in the deficits.”
What the father understood in 1971, the son understands today. Neither of them had support from either party on the issue of the deficit. The Post reported:
Senators of both parties were left fuming, with most of their ire directed toward Paul.“He has mastered the art of ticking off his colleagues,” said Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.).
“It’s a colossal waste of everybody’s time,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). Of Paul, Thune said, “He never gets a result.”
"He never gets a result." That is not an epitaph on Paul's career in the Senate. It is an epitaph for the American Republic.
We have crossed the Rubicon.