Four Questions

The Constitution requires the President to “from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

On Tuesday night, the President gave his final State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. It is thus a fitting time to look back on his tenure in office, and to contemplate what his legacy will be.

The very Constitutional text I cited above requires that the two branches work together. The President shall “recommend” measures, but he cannot dictate to Congress. Congress sends bills to the President which he can either sign or veto. Congress writes the laws, and the President executes them.

The President made a number of recommendations on Tuesday. His speech was organized around four questions: how to “give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security,” how to “make technology work for us,” how to “keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman,” and, finally, how to “make our politics reflect what’s best in us.”

The President is asking the right questions, though perhaps in the wrong order. Of course, we’re not all going to agree on the answers. Each of us would probably answer them somewhat differently, as they allow for any number of options.

I’d like to offer some brief responses to these questions, in hope that they can begin a respectful and constructive dialogue about Congressional priorities for the rest of this year.

Government can ensure fairness of opportunity and economic security best by limiting or controlling its own activity. When government intervenes in the economy, it tends to do so at the benefit of some, and at the expense of others. It tends to rig the game in favor of the politically powerful; it tends to put its heavy finger on the scales of the market. For just one example, as the old saying goes, when you subsidize something, you get more of it; when you tax something, you get less of it. The federal government today spends billions of dollars in various subsidies, and has a tax code that is several times longer than the Bible.

True economic fairness requires the government to be impartial — and impartiality requires that the government minimize its footprint on the choices we make with our resources.

Making technology work for us is also something best done by people, not government. The Obama Administration spent three years and hundreds of million dollars and couldn’t even build a functional website — healthcare.gov. Moreover, the federal government is $18.5 trillion in debt — hardly a strong investment position.

When trying to find the right purposes for research and development, the market not only inherently knows better, but moves faster than government ever could. People decide where to invest based on what is most likely to succeed; government makes investment decisions based on politics.

Keeping America safe is government’s first and most important duty. It is also what government is best suited to doing. Everything else depends upon our security — our economy, our technology, our political discourse, even the upholding of our rights.

We need to prepare not only for the threats we know about, but for contingencies and potential threats. We simply don’t know what the next five years might bring about, just as no one saw the rise of ISIS coming before 2013. For example, both World Wars caught our industrial sector by surprise, and it took years to catch up on building what we should have already prepared. It is clear from these perilous experiences, and from the fearful prospects of today, that dealing with our current threats alone is not enough.

Finally, elevating our political discourse requires leading by example. Unfortunately, the President just hasn’t done that. He has almost obsessively fixated upon Republicans or straw men whom he called Republicans, attacking them continually and in every circumstance, even when he is overseas. He has called Republicans a variety of names, some of which are not even printable. It will go down in history as a tragedy that, after being elected on promises of healing our partisan divides, the President then immediately turned and inflamed them more than perhaps any President in decades.

There is still a year for hope and for change. I remain willing to work with this President to protect our country, to reduce the government’s footprint in our economy, to get government out of the way of technological advances, and to finally begin the process of healing the partisan political divide.