Seeking cooperation in a polarized climate, President Barack Obama called on Congress Tuesday to act quickly on bipartisan measures that would extend tax breaks for small businesses and help startup companies raise money. He said he would sign the legislation “right away.”

Obama plans to include a series of business measures that have been percolating in Congress in his 2013 budget proposal later this month to flesh out a year-old initiative to give entrepreneurs incentives to expand their businesses or start new ones.

Obama made his remarks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. He noted that for the first time, the head of the Small Business Administration, Karen Mills, was participating as a full member of the Cabinet.

“It is a symbol of how important it is for us to spur entrepreneurship, to help startups, to move aggressively so that we can assure more companies that create the most jobs in our economy are getting a leg up from various programs that we have in our government,” Obama said.

The White House legislative agenda for small businesses includes permanently eliminating tax rates on capital gains for investments in small businesses and a one-year extension on the ability of all businesses to immediately deduct all of the costs of equipment and software purchases.

The Obama administration also is seeking a new 10 percent tax credit for small businesses that add jobs or increase wages in 2012. In addition, the legislation would make it easier for new startup companies to raise money and to go public. It also would expand a government small business investment program from $3 billion to $4 billion.

“The president has made small businesses and particularly startups a key aspect of his economic growth agenda because he understands how much the newest and fastest-growing small businesses drive job growth in our economy,” said Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council.

Obama said the Department of Homeland Security also is seeking ways to change the visa process to attract foreign-born entrepreneurs and high-skilled immigrants to invest in the United States or start new businesses.

The measures are modest by comparison to Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus or to last year’s jobs bill. But they borrow from past Obama initiatives and from bipartisan legislation that has either already passed in the House or is being proposed in the Senate.

Obama’s package includes proposals offered in the Senate by Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware and Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, and another plan by Republican Jerry Moran of Kansas and Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia.

White House officials would not disclose the total cost of the president’s package, but Sperling said it would be more than covered by proposals to reduce tax expenditures and by closed loopholes the administration will call for in its 2013 budget.

With the presidential election set to become the main political preoccupation of 2012, the White House initiative is designed to take advantage of cooperative attempts by Republicans and Democrats to find modest remedies to spur the economy. Most of those efforts have been overshadowed by congressional bickering, the Republican presidential primary and Obama’s growing attention to his re-election.

The proposals come a year after the administration launched a consolidated effort to spur new startup businesses with a high-profile White House event featuring scores of entrepreneurs, some of whom offered testimonials to the job creation possibilities that new businesses can bring to the economy.

Besides the tax breaks, a central element of the Obama package is to assist new entrepreneurs by making it easier for them to raise money, reducing taxes on their startup expenses and removing securities barriers for new companies that have gone public.

“Our small business agenda has a specific focus on removing the barriers that have for too long blocked startups and entrepreneurs from getting the financing they need to accelerate their growth and hiring,” Sperling said.

One of the Obama provisions would increase the amount of money that can be raised through small public offerings that don’t require companies to undergo an extensive Securities and Exchange Commission registration process. The limit for such “mini public offerings” would increase from $5 million a year to $50 million. The House passed similar legislation last year.

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The amount of money the federal government takes out of the U.S. economy in taxes will increase by more than 30 percent between 2012 and 2014, according to the Budget and Economic Outlookpublished today by the CBO.

At the same time, according to CBO, the economy will remain sluggish, partly because of higher taxes.

“In particular, between 2012 and 2014, revenues in CBO’s baseline shoot up by more than 30 percent,” said CBO, “mostly because of the recent or scheduled expirations of tax provisions, such as those that lower income tax rates and limit the reach of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), and the imposition of new taxes, fees, and penalties that are scheduled to go into effect.”

The U.S. economy, CBO projects, will perform “below its potential” for another six years and unemployment will remain above 7 percent for another three.

“The pace of the economic recovery has been slow since the recession ended in June 2009, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects that, under current laws governing taxes and spending, the economy will continue to grow at a sluggish pace over the next two years,” said CBO. “That pace of growth partly reflects the dampening effect on economic activity from the higher tax rates and curbs on spending scheduled to occur this year and especially next. Although CBO projects that growth will pick up after 2013, the agency expects that the economy’s output will remain below its potential until 2018 and that the unemployment rate will remain above 7 percent until 2015.”

According to the CBO report, federal tax revenues equaled $2.302 trillion in fiscal 2011, and will increase to $2,523 trillion in fiscal 2012, $2,988 trillion in fiscal in 2013, and $3,313 trillion in 2014.

As a percentage of GDP, according to CBO, federal tax revenues were 15.4 percent in fiscal 2011, and will be 16.3 percent in 2012, 18.8 percent in 2013, and 20.0 percent in fiscal 2014.

In dollar terms, the anticipated increase in federal tax revenue from fiscal 2011 ($2.302 trillion) to fiscal 2014 ($3.313 trillion) is $1.011 trillion. That is an increase of 43.9 percent.

From just 2012 to 2014, the increase in federal tax revenues from $2.523 trillion to $3.313 trillion equals $790 billion—or 31.3 percent.

The anticipated percentage increase in federal tax revenue is not only large when calculated in dollar terms but also when calculated as a share of GDP. The jump from 15.4 percent of GDP in fiscal 2011 to 20.0 percent of GDP in fiscal 2014 equals an increase of 29.8 percent. The jump from 16.3 percent in fiscal 2012 to 20.0 percent in fiscal 2014 equals an increase over two years of 22.7 percent.

Federal tax revenues have averaged “about 18 percent of GDP for the past 40 years,” according to CBO. So, in the next two years federal tax revenues will rise from a level that is below the modern historical average to a level that is above it.

President Barack Obama wears his decision to rescue General Motors and Chrysler three years ago as a badge of honor, a move to save jobs in an industry that helped create the backbone of the middle class more than a half-century ago.

For Obama, the auto bailout is a case study for his efforts to revive the economy and a potential point of contrast with Republican Mitt Romney, who opposed Obama’s decision to pour billions of dollars into the auto companies. The president’s campaign views the auto storyline as a potent argument against Romney, the son of a Detroit auto executive who later served as Michigan governor.

If Romney wins the GOP nomination, expect to hear a lot about the car industry.

“The American auto industry was on the verge of collapse. And some politicians were willing to let it just die. We said no,” Obama told college students last week in Ann Arbor, Mich. “We believe in the workers of this state.”

Obama was expected to visit the Washington Auto Show on Tuesday, giving him another forum to talk about GM and Chrysler, along with the administration’s attention to manufacturers and efforts to boost fuel efficiency standards. The White House has taken every opportunity to highlight its efforts to rebuild the auto industry, pointing to GM’s reemergence as the world’s largest automaker and job growth and profitability in the U.S. auto industry.

As the industry was collapsing in the fall of 2008, the former Massachusetts governor predicted in a New York Times op-ed that if the companies received a federal bailout, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” Romney said the companies should have undergone a “managed bankruptcy” that would have avoided a government bailout.

“Whether it was by President Bush or by President Obama, it was the wrong way to go,” Romney said at a GOP presidential debate in Michigan in November. Romney said the nation has “capital markets and bankruptcy — it works in the U.S. The idea of billions of dollars being wasted initially, then finally they adopted the managed bankruptcy. I was among others that said we ought to do that.”

Both the Bush and Obama administrations found themselves in uncharted territory in the fall of 2008 and early 2009. GM and Chrysler were on the verge of collapse when Congress failed to approve emergency loans in late 2008. Bush stepped in and signed off on $17.4 billion in loans, requiring the companies to develop restructuring plans under Obama’s watch.

The following spring, Obama pumped billions more into GM and Chrysler but forced concessions from industry stakeholders, enabling the companies to go through swift bankruptcies. Obama aides said billions in aid — about $85 billion for the industry in total — was necessary because capital markets were essentially frozen at the time, meaning there was no way for GM and Chrysler to fund their bankruptcies privately.

Without any private financing or government support, they argued, the companies would have been forced to liquidate.

Three years later, Obama is trying to turn the tough decision into a political advantage in Ohio and Michigan, which Obama carried in 2008 and where unemployment has fallen of late. During last week’s State of the Union address, Obama said the auto industry had hired tens of thousands of workers, and he predicted the Detroit turnaround could take root elsewhere.

Yet Obama’s poll numbers in places like Ohio and Michigan remain in dangerous territory, under 50 percent, and the auto industry argument carries some inherent risks.

A Quinnipiac University poll in Ohio released Jan. 18 found Obama locked in a virtual tie with Romney in a hypothetical matchup, with about half the voters disapproving of Obama’s performance as president. A poll in Michigan released last week by Lansing-based EPIC-MRA found 48 percent supporting Obama and 40 percent backing Romney in a potential matchup.

Republicans say the bailout still remains unpopular and the government intervention was hardly a cure-all. “The industry was bailed out but a lot of people lost their jobs,” said David Doyle, a Michigan-based Republican strategist.

In a nation still soured on bailouts, the government owns more than a quarter of GM. The Treasury Department estimates the government will lose more than $23 billion on the auto bailout: GM is trading at $24 a share, well below the $53-per-share mark needed for the government to recoup its investment in the company.

Romney, facing attacks from Democrats on his work at private equity firm Bain Capital, has tried to use the GM and Chrysler cases to insulate himself against charges his firm gutted companies and fired workers. “How did you do when you were running General Motors as the president?” Romney said in a December debate. “Gee, you closed down factories. You closed down dealerships. And he’ll say, well I did that to save the business. Same thing with us, Mr. President.”

Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and others say the decision, while unpopular, saved an estimated 1 million jobs throughout the Midwest and say the industry is coming back.

As a result of the restructuring, the companies can make money at far lower U.S. sales volumes than in the past. Industry analysts predict U.S. sales will grow by at least 1 million this year over last year’s 12.8 million units as people replace aging cars and trucks. And North American operations at GM, Chrysler and Ford are thriving, boosting their companies’ earnings — all signs that Democrats say will make the difference in the Midwest.

“I don’t know how any reasonable person can fail to acknowledge that this rescue plan worked and the country has benefited,” said former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat.

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n November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.

Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”

As conservatives looked in desperation to the judiciary for relief, Davis was their logical leader. A highly esteemed former solicitor general under President Wilson, former ambassador to Great Britain, former president of the American Bar Association, and senior partner at one of New York’s premier law firms, Davis commanded respect from all quarters of the political and legal spectrum. As a founder of the bipartisan, anti–New Deal Liberty League in 1934, Davis repeatedly wrote to his supporters, “I believe in the Constitution of the United States; I believe in the division of powers that it makes. I believe in the right of private property, the sanctity and binding power of contracts; the duty of self-help. I am opposed to confiscatory taxation, wasteful expenditure, socialized industry, and a planned economy controlled and directed by government functionaries. I believe these things to be inimical to human liberty and destructive of American ideals.”

Sensing the gravity of the crisis, Davis seized every opportunity and expertly wielded every legal weapon at his disposal to thwart the New Deal. Publicly labeling the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) “a bribe to farmers,” he signed the amicus curiaebrief and successfully led the fight that ultimately resulted in the court’s 6–3 ruling that the AAA was unconstitutional. He successfully opposed the Public Utility Holding Act in the lower courts and led the fight against it within the American Bar Association. Davis personally argued the unconstitutionality of the Frazier-Lemke Bankruptcy Act and the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act before the Supreme Court.

When Roosevelt responded to these courtroom defeats by setting forth his infamous court-packing scheme in 1937, it was Davis who advised the New Deal’s congressional opponents in defeating the measure. By the late 1930s, he had earned the New Dealers’ enduring enmity, and he wore with pride their sobriquet, “Public Enemy Number One.”

During the course of these battles, Davis repeatedly warned that “paternalism fastens its grasp upon the country, and, little by little, the practice of local self-government fades away. Baptize a scheme, even the most fantastic, with a high-sounding and attractive title, and it will elicit the public support.” Of the failure to limit government, he admonished, “Nothing but mischief, to my way of thinking, can come from any government attempting tasks which lie beyond its power to accomplish.” Ever clear about the indivisibility of property rights from human rights, Davis contended, “The two are not antagonistic. History furnishes no instance where the right of man to acquire and hold property has been taken away without the complete destruction of liberty in all its forms.”

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America’s premier Special Operations force is once again in the headlines after a team of Navy SEALs rescued two hostages from captivity in Somalia last week. Elite U.S. forces have carried out such operations periodically over the past decade, always with skill and bravery. The difference in recent months is that the details of their work haven’t remained secret. On the contrary, government officials have revealed them for political gain—endangering our forces in the process.

The floodgates opened after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May, and the Obama administration’s lack of discretion was on display again at …

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President Barack Obama offered his administration’s most sweeping public defense of the U.S. drone campaign, saying the unmanned attacks haven’t killed a large number of civilians but instead have been cautiously deployed to target terrorists.

“Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” Mr. Obama said Monday when asked about the drone program during an online question-and-answer session.

“There’s this perception that we’re just sending a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly,” he added. “This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans. …

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President Obama plans to cut the Pentagon budget by half a trillion dollars or more in the next decade. He also wants the military to take on new missions, principally for the Navy to lead an American strategic “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific.

Something has to give. Care to guess what?

The Administration’s record to date is undeniable. Defense was targeted from day one in office, and Mr. Obama disguised his latest, steepest retrenchment as part of a new “strategic review” earlier this month. The Pentagon on Thursday previewed the cuts, announcing that the 2013 defense budget due next month will …

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One of the few Members of Florida’s Republican U.S. House delegation who is neutral in the presidential primary Tuesday took some time to discuss the heated GOP race, the fall campaign, and the issue of illegal immigration with HUMAN EVENTS.

Freshman Rep. Dan Webster is a much-loved conservative in the Sunshine State since he became the first Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives in 1994.  Two years ago, Webster’s reputation among conservatives nationwide was enhanced when he unseated Rep. Alan Grayson, by far one of the most outspoken liberal Democrats in Congress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4GKIUHe8g8

Courted by presidential hopefuls for his blessing, Orlando-area Rep. Webster steadfastly remains “publicly neutral,” but explained that this does not mean he won’t have a choice when he goes into the voting booth January 31.

Like many conservatives in Florida, Webster voiced concern about the increasingly shrill tone the presidential primary has taken among the Republican hopefuls. He noted that there is one person that criticism and disagreement should be focused on “and that’s Barack Obama,” who, he said, has a very different agenda for America than any of the Republicans.

We mentioned one issue that has divided Republicans and it is particularly come to the surface in Florida: illegal immigration. Could Republicans come together on this, even though some may differ over related subjects such as the DREAM Act (to provide college tuition for the children of illegal immigrants). Webster believes that differences on points of the issue aside, Republicans will present a sharp contrast to the position of President Obama, who, in his words, “has a ‘dream’ of his own and that’s a dream that all people regardless of their legal status come into the United States and get full benefits that citizens do.”  He emphasized that Obama “is very clear about this” and it shouldn’t be difficult for the eventual Republican nominee to draw a contrast with the Democratic president.

For all the invective and charges that fly like shrapnel in the GOP contest, Webster made it clear to HUMAN EVENTS he feels the party can come together, focus on differences with Obama, and put Florida’s electoral votes in the Republican column in the fall.

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When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. Pliny, in keeping with the customs of the empire, did not care about forcing Christians to believe that the emperor was a god. But in public they had to behave as if they did. Thus, the Christians were in the dock not so much because of their faith in a risen Christ as over their willful refusal to declare themselves part of the reigning social order.

I thought of Pliny when I read that the Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. I also recalled the times that President Obama and other members of his administration have supported “freedom of worship.” However, as in Pliny’s time, “freedom of worship” is not the same thing as “freedom of religion.” The former means that one may believe whatever one wants and worship privately without interference, whereas the latter allows one freedom to live in the world at large consistent with one’s faith tenets, even if they are not endorsed by the state.

Because the administration is knowingly forcing (primarily Catholic) religious organizations to pay for medical services to which they are theologically opposed, the new rules represent a frontal assault on freedom of religion at an institutional level. This is no small matter. To date, public controversies over “conscience” in health care have mostly involved individuals — e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists — whose personal morality or religious convictions conflicted with the provision of certain medical procedures or substances. For example, pharmacies in Washington State and Illinois have litigated over the right of owners to refuse to dispense contraception on religious grounds. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the pharmacies and in favor of a state regulation (since withdrawn for reconsideration) requiring them to dispense legally prescribed medications. An Illinois state court took the opposite view in a similar case.

But the free-birth-control rule goes much further than creating a potential conflict between the general law and individual religious beliefs. Rather, the rule targets the right of religious organizations to conduct their public activities consistently with their religious dogma and moral values — except within the narrow confines of an actual church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or monastery.

This isn’t an accident. The preliminary rule, which will remain unchanged in the final version, created a very narrowly tailored religious exemption (page 46,623 of the Federal Register). To qualify for exemption as a “religious employer,” an organization must meet four criteria:

1. The “inculcation of religious values” is “its purpose.”

2. It “primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets.”

3. “It primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.”

4. It is a non-profit organization under sections of the code that “refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”

Lest there be any doubt of the limited nature of the exemption, the proposed rule states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.”

Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the same order’s elementary school probably would. Ditto a hospital established by the nuns.

Even more telling: Despite much screaming from opponents, the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to broaden the religious exemption in the final rule — forcing religiously founded organizations to violate their parent church’s teachings, a frontal assault on the freedom of faiths to operate institutional outreach organizations consistent with their beliefs. If this rule stands, it won’t end there. If Catholic organizations can be compelled by federal diktat to violate their religious tenets, so can other religious organizations in different contexts.

Some have argued that a recent 9–0 Supreme Court ruling allowing a Lutheran church to fire a minister who in a secular organization would have been protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act provides shelter against the free-birth-control rule. I think not. That case was not about “freedom of religion,” as I have defined it here, but “freedom of worship” — the Court ruled that churches are free to decide on the criteria for appointing and releasing their own ministers and individual leaders without interference. But the free-birth-control rule isn’t about the “ministerial exception.” Rather, it imposes a legal duty on faith organizations to comply with the values of the state whenever they engage in public action or charitable enterprise among the general society.

In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the Obama administration intends not only to force churches to do what the state directs, but even to speak as the state directs. From Sebelius’s official statement about the promulgation of the new rule:

We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support.

Thus, the Obama administration is attacking even freedom of worship by forcing exempt organizations to tell their employees where and how they can violate church teaching.

The birth-control rule is the latest and most egregious example of government forcing religious organizations to conform their operations to reigning secular moral values. In this sense, faith organizations are being compelled to participate in a metaphorical Caesar worship. As in the Roman Empire, the government will allow religious organizations general freedom of worship, but, increasingly, not freedom of religion. Pliny would approve.

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Mitch McConnell wanted you to know he was livid on Thursday. The Senate was about to Greece the wheels for adding yet another trillion and change to President Obama’s yet-again tapped-out credit card. “More spending, more debt,” brayed the minority leader. “That’s what we’ve gotten from this administration.” Well, no, Senator, that’s what we’ve gotten from you.

Yes, I know, Obama is the one driving us off the cliff. But as McConnell and his fellow Republicans are well aware, he couldn’t have filled his tank without them — and they are the guys who got us halfway up the summit before handing the president the car keys. No one is falling for this week’s debt-increase “disapproval” charade, the stage for which was set by last summer’s sleight-of-hand, when Republicans agreed to borrow another $2.4 trillion. As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable.

For the record, it was Republicans who nearly doubled the national debt during the Bush years — increasing it by almost $5 trillion. Some context: It had taken the nation over 200 years to accumulate roughly the same amount of debt rung up from 2001 through 2008 — a time during most of which, besides holding the White House, Republicans held the Senate (with McConnell in the leadership, first as whip and later as leader) and the House (with now-speaker John Boehner in the leadership, first as a committee chairman, then as leader).

Of course, for the Left, enough is never enough. So when Obama took over, he made the GOP look positively stingy — running up more debt in half the time, with perennial trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see. With debt rising about $4 billion per day and each citizen’s share nearing $50,000, frightened voters opted to give Republicans a second chance, electing them in historic numbers in the 2010 midterms. This was not because they suddenly loved Republicans. They didn’t — and don’t. It was because the GOP was the only available alternative. And it was because leaders such as McConnell and Boehner, affecting a chastened pose, promised that if given the opportunity, they’d slam on the brakes.

Last summer, they had their big chance: Debt hit $14.3 trillion, the statutory ceiling — “ceiling” being Washingtonese for the point at which the money we’ve borrowed to pay the interest on prior loans for ever-expanding government spending no longer covers the tab because of the added interest on the new loans, necessitating more loans, resulting in more interest, triggering more — well, you get the idea. Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.

Instead, they did what they always do: They caved. They shriveled in the heat of Obamedia scaremongering about a purportedly imminent sovereign-debt default that would shred the full faith and credit of the United States. It was bogus. As McConnell and Boehner knew, the debt ceiling was scraped only because the total government spending they annually authorize now outstrips revenues by well over a trillion dollars. There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat — the threat too terrible to contemplate — was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit (i.e., a ceiling about three times as high as what Leviathan cost us in the mid-Nineties, when President Clinton pronounced the era of Big Government over).

So rather than confess that they had no stomach for the fight, McConnell and Boehner settled on two coats of camouflage. The first involved orchestrating the farce we’ve just witnessed: Republicans contrived a byzantine process that enabled them to raise the debt ceiling but dole the new trillions out in installments. As the installments came due, Republicans would pretend to vote against them . . . and hope you didn’t notice that we were talking about installments only because Congress had already voted in favor of the whole debt enchilada.

The second coat is just as disingenuous as the first. With an assist from compliant conservative pundits — who somehow always find a way to rationalize runaway Republican spending for a new entitlement here, a financial-sector bailout there, and a global sharia-democracy enterprise for good measure — GOP congressional leaders treated us to the dolorous refrain that they “control one-half of one-third of the government,” so what could you really expect them to do?

Does that pass your laugh test? Does the Supreme Court’s bloc of reliably progressive jurists ever come to the Left and say, “Gee, we’d love to help you out — maybe create constitutional rights to abortion, to protect murderers against the death penalty, to invent special rights for homosexuals, to curb free speech in election campaigns, to invite terrorist war prisoners to challenge their detention in civilian courts, all those things on your wish list. But as luck has it, we control only one-half of one-third of the government. It just wouldn’t be right to use our power that way”?

I don’t recall our commentariat’s complaining that President Bush controlled only one-third of the government when he decided — against deep congressional and public opposition — to order the surge. I seem to remember the argument being that without the surge, al-Qaeda would achieve a catastrophic triumph in Iraq, and that when the stakes for the nation are that high, elected leaders are obligated to use the power the Constitution gives them to advance the national interest — even if doing so is unpopular, brings down the wrath of the left-wing press, and risks an electoral rout.

The bunkum about controlling only a minority slice of the government is embarrassing. Divided government is not rule by a majority of government officials. Our Constitution’s separation of powers makes different components of government supreme in different areas. The judiciary gets to resolve legal controversies regardless of what the other two branches think. President Obama is convinced he needn’t even consult Congress, much less get authorization, before starting a war in Libya or sending troops to fight in Uganda. Either party in the Senate can reject a perfectly qualified judicial or cabinet nominee even though it is only one-half of one-third of the government.

The same Constitution that gives the judiciary, the commander-in-chief, and the Senate these powers directs that the House of Representatives — the body closest and most responsive to the public — is supreme when it comes to raising revenue. It prescribes, moreover, that money cannot be borrowed on the credit of the United States unless Congress authorizes it. President Obama can demagogue all he likes, but he can’t borrow a dime.

This has nothing to with holding a minority share of the pie; it has to do with holding the share that has primary power over the subject at hand. When it comes to the subjects of borrowing and spending the United States into oblivion, primary power belongs to the Republican-controlled House and to the Senate whose parliamentary procedures ensure that nothing can happen unless 40 Republicans give their assent.

Unbelievably, the United States now has a banana-republic-esque debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent — we’ve borrowed more money than our gigantic economy produces annually. Obama has led us to the edge of the abyss, but Republicans had the wherewithal to stop him. The public’s desperation to stop him was its sole basis for electing them. Republicans know that, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to do the job — and they put a lot more energy into making believe than making the fight.

The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?

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