Lawyer Language: from "budget" to "sequester"

Ever wonder where the term “sequestration” as used by Congress these days came from?  What’s being sequestered, and why, and how?  The explanation serves as proof – as if we needed more – that lawyers in general (probably), but especially the ones who become politicians, are snake oil salesman who manipulate language, or even create it like J.R.R. Tolkien using it to lend credence to an imaginary world, in order to create a world in which they are required to interpret it back to the people it is supposed to serve.  Gotta give them credit for the ingenious approach to job security!

Sequestration refers to the legal act of holding property (not money; property) in trust, in order to prevent squabbling parties from destroying it while the real ownership is legally determined.  So far it makes perfect sense.  We can all imagine scenarios in which this seems like a reasonable action to take.  Picture your 5 year old little brother holding your Cal Ripken, Jr. rookie card over  a candle, claiming that it belongs to him because he found it (…in your shoebox, on the top shelf in your room).  Since it is in his possession, your claim to its ownership is in question.  It makes perfect sense for your parents to step in, rescue the card from the flame, and hold onto it until its true ownership can be worked out.  Did your brother really “find” it?  Had you, via gross neglect, legally abandoned your claim to it?  Everyone agrees the card is worthy of being rescued.  Likewise, most would agree that its owner should be allowed to burn it, or anything else the legal owner wants to do with it.  Sequestration is a good idea, and thus far, it’s even a good word to describe the process.  It is a word that matches a definition most humans can understand.

Here’s the problem with Congress (lawyers) adopting the term in their annual budget cat fight:  it no longer refers to property in any kind of jeopardy. It’s money.  In fact, it’s not even money, really; it’s a forecast of money.  Back in 1985, the Gramm Rudman Hollings Deficit Reduction Act tried to fix a flaw that had grown out of another lawyer-created process – the national budget.  The way the budget worked before Gramm Rudman Hollings was that various unrelated appropriations bills got added into the overall budget discussion thereby guaranteeing that the total proposed spending would exceed revenue because no one oversaw the big picture.  Each bill’s sponsor was focused solely on his or her own priorities, and they operated outside of the budget committees.  When all of these bills got lumped together into the budget, unsurprisingly, the checkbook didn’t balance.  So Gramm Rudman Hollings basically said from now on when this happens, if Congress can’t figure out how to make it work by a specified deadline, an amount equal to the deficit will be set aside – sequestered – until this extra deficit is cut OR until the debt limit is raised.  If no agreement is reached, this “sequestered amount” will be deducted from all programs across the board until the checkbook is “balanced.”  Except for the fact that Congress considers at least some deficit spending to be “balanced” and the fact that several budget areas (military, Social Security…) are exempt from these automatic cuts, leaving the remaining programs to share  far larger cuts, it’s kind of a good idea. Gramm Rudman Hollings certainly didn’t solve or prohibit deficit spending, but at least it forced Congress to look at it, and agree to the extent of it. 

That was then.

Before I continue down the trite “let’s kill all the lawyers” path, I should mention this:  Lawyers are English teachers at heart. (and I have a special place in my heart for English teachers)  They discuss, analyze, and interpret literature (stories, legal precedents, laws…same thing) in order to find meaning and guidance for the rest of us. Literature provides a discussion point from which we can debate and discuss the most important issues to mankind without the constraints of personal and emotional involvement – without having suffered the experiences ourselves.  With the personal and emotional removed, we can then apply logic to the discussion and arrive at a mutually agreed upon better understanding of what we’ve learned, how to apply it in our lives. It’s identical to the way religious people derive moral guidance from their various religious texts, only lawyers (and English teachers, Literature buffs, book club members, and atheists) do it without the cognitive dissonance resulting from literal belief in fictional tales.   Lawyers do this with stories and laws men have created, stories and laws which, with any luck, have been arrived at via similarly unemotional, rational discussion and debate.

This is now. 

Gramm Rudman Hollings remains a decent band aid to put on the bleeding wound of a budget process grown too big to be workable (lawyer-designed), but we seem to have forgotten that the use of the term “sequestration” was, and I’m giving Congress the benefit of the doubt here, metaphorical.  It was a nickname applied because of the vague similarity of the process to actual legal sequestration of property.  You don’t sequester money!  You can’t sequester forecast borrowed (and therefore imaginary) money.  This money doesn’t exist.  It’s not in a lock box and sequestration won’t protect it, nor will it take any actual money from even the non-exempt budget areas in order to stay below the debt ceiling… because it’s not money… it’s a budget outlining how money we haven’t borrowed yet might be appropriated.  Likewise the “debt ceiling” – that boundary line of borrowed money that sequestration intends to maintain – is also figurative.  These terms were used as shorthand to ease the discussion, simplify and expedite the explanation of how they work.  The amounts in question are rather arbitrarily created. The checkbook is never literally balanced.  The federal budget has always included borrowed money in its definition of “balanced checkbook.”  And that’s fine and dandy… until we start interpreting these figurative terms as literal or pretending the nicknames for these conceptual abstractions are the hard nouns identifying actual concrete things.

A literal perspective of an actual budget looks like this:  Money comes in.  Money goes out.  When those two pools of actual money are equal, that budget is literally balanced. Whether it’s a kid’s lemonade stand, Microsoft, or the USA, that is literally what we mean when we say budget.  Enter the lawyers who became politicians.  Rather than risking losing an election by administering literal budget practices and angering constituents when actual programs must be cut, they went the Tolkien route and created their own language.  This new language allows them to describe “balancing the budget” even when expenses far exceed revenue.  Obviously anyone with 6^th grade math skills knows that’s not possible and so the new language adds layers and layers of complexity so that the appearance of college math is require to understand it.  Few people who aren’t math teachers even remember the titles of college math courses and the problem is instantly solved.  Our budget process isn’t ridiculous and arbitrary, it’s complex, beyond a lehman’s grasp.

That’s not only bullshit, it’s also a little unfair on my part.  The budget of a nation of over 300 million people is a little more complex than that of a kid’s lemonade stand.  The depth and breadth of what that budget covers, from the security of a ready and well-equipped military to a single Head Start breakfast is massive by scale alone, even without considering the complex formulas by which it must be derived in pursuit of equity and fiscal responsibility.  But that’s just it.  The misuse of these mangled terms is specifically to avoid responsibility.  For Congressmen.

To have settled on the misnomer of “sequestration” was a handy expedient, but to have forgotten that it is merely a nickname, and to now hold the nation hostage over a process created by the same body who are now the hostage takers, and who suddenly believe the term is literal is irrational…the opposite of what we expect from lawyer language.

Luth,

Out

It's about our culture, not our laws

There’s a Sylvester Stallone movie coming out soon titled BULLET TO THE HEAD.  I haven’t seen it, but the trailers indicate it’s like every other action movie out there…glorified violence and revenge.  I don’t for one minute suspect that the niche market such movies serve actually plays any kind of direct connection to gun violence.  I don’t think such movies should be banned.  Hell, I might even like it, but the entire notion of a title like that getting green-lighted as a full budget endeavor featuring a major star is a perfect indicator of just how different our culture is from any other country with legal guns.

BULLET TO THE HEAD is based on a graphic novel, so its treatment of violence is a comic book’s treatment of violence – that of a two-dimensional, oversimplified world that only a child or someone whose capacities are severely limited would ever confuse with the real world.  One other fun fact is that the original graphic novel on which it is based is French!  (and everyone in the NRA knows the French are sissies!)

What’s any of this got to do with the NRA or gun laws?  Well, I’ve been thinking lately… for the first time in my life I might actually agree with something NRA President, Wayne LaPierre, said.  At least in part.

I don’t think it’s about our gun laws; it’s about our gun culture.

I’ve only recently arrived at this new conclusion and the realization that it means I agree with Mr. LaPierre. I’ve had guns in my household all my life, but I’ve never once been tempted to join the NRA.  During the years in which this opinion was formed, Charlton Heston represented that organization.  As I watched him slowly prove through frequent public tirades that he’d lost sight of the distinction between playing Moses in a movie and actually being Moses, I also saw signs that many of his followers were under similar delusions.  I was disheartened and embarrassed at my fellow gun owners for their inability to rationally discuss gun laws.  Even among close friends, and after taking pains to keep partisan politics out of the private discussions, folks I knew and trusted seemed to have drunk the Kool-Aid and refused to even consider that this nation might be able to come up with better gun laws than we have.  Period.  Not necessarily stricter, not necessarily banning any particular model or type, just better laws. I believe my countrymen are bright enough to take this on.  Many of my fellow gun owners, and the public sentiment of the NRA indicate otherwise.

For most of my life, the public face of the NRA seemed dead set against even having that conversation. Under President Heston, they proved themselves to be something far more frightening than an assault rifle. They helped create a culture of fear.  They established themselves as a giant, rich, and therefore powerful lobby 100% committed to NOT having a discussion. Nothing pushes a paranoid public toward their guns more than fear and a sense of powerlessness.  This was a brilliant strategy for the NRA. It’s a brilliant strategy for niche movies like the Charles Bronson franchises of the 80s, and just about every Sylvester Stallone movie.  It’s had terrible results on our nation and our political process.  There is little wiggle room in that kind of stance.  If you won’t discuss our disagreement, you are, by definition irrational, and you offer no contribution to a potential solution.  You ARE part of the problem.  In its own way, my own acquiescence to this stereotype (of the NRA and its members) distracted me from actually looking at the issue.  I was content to know (and I still KNOW this) that anyone not willing to talk is not rational, not worth talking to, and so went the NRA.

Sure, I knew the NRA sponsored and promoted safe gun handling and practices.  Though I’d had a hunting license long before the state of Ohio required completion of a hunter safety course to get one, I took the NRA course anyway and found it very well done.  But no good deed goes unpunished, and where your public face is clearly as insane as your refusal to talk, I had no use for such an organization outside of that classroom.  In fact, I simply couldn’t connect anything about the NRA with my experience in that classroom.  The class was good, sound, logical.  It didn’t in any way match with the NRA I‘d come to know.  Just like many of my smart, educated, logical friends who owned guns…I couldn’t connect what I knew about them in just about any other circumstance with how stupid they acted at the mere mention of the words “gun control.”  Suddenly they lost all critical thinking skills, listening skills, the ability to even have a conversation.  So I’m hoping this revelation of mine represents some kind of meeting at the crossroads.  That we’re finally ready to have this conversation.

That may not sound like I’ve reached any new conclusions, and as I sit back and think about it, maybe I haven’t.  Maybe I’ve agreed all along that the law doesn’t much matter. Gun laws really do only affect law abiding citizens.  But if that’s the case, then why does the NRA so fear any new or revised gun law?  It’s NEVER even been hinted at during my lifetime that anyone, even the most liberal presidential hopeful would EVER try to outlaw guns.  EVER.  Except by the NRA, which means their entire argument is fully encased in logical fallacy – the slippery slope.  And if you think the now expired definition of “assault rifle” is a tad ridiculous, like I do, then why won’t you help craft a better one instead of refusing to talk at all?

There I go again, getting distracted by the opposition’s weakness to the point that I’m blind or deaf to the rare, few valid points they make.  It’s not about the law; it’s about the culture.

On that note Wayne LaPierre and I completely agree. If only life were oversimplified and 2-dimensional enough to leave it at that. If only life were just a movie based on a French comic book. OR, if only we could work together and figure out a better way forward. Remember how cool smoking used to be?  Had we, as a nation tried to simply outlaw it, we NEVER would have reduced the health problems we have by reducing the number of smokers in our population. We’d still be arguing about it today.  We’d have polarized groups of tobacco manufacturers and consumers on one side and tree hugging health nuts (and some consumers too) on the other, even though the extremes of those groups only represent a tiny fraction of society.   Had we tried to ban a certain type of cigarette, such an effort would have failed from the start, and that tiny fraction would have held our nation hostage and prevented any progress. The tobacco shift was a cultural shift, not a legal shift.  Wayne and I would have been simpatico throughout it up to a point.  However, in order for that cultural shift to gain enough momentum to work, some laws had to change too. In order for our society to be able to weigh the importance of individual freedoms, the rights of industry, and the associated public costs, we had to have a conversation and leave laws on the table. Even if they squeeze out a few individual freedoms, or threaten some industry profits  That’s how law works in a country like ours. People (and corporations are people now) share individual sacrifice for the greater good.  But it can't happen if major players simply refuse to talk.

So we’re gonna have to talk about laws in order to talk about creating a similar shift in our values when it comes to guns.  Poll after poll tells us the NRA is just plain wrong when it comes to the public sentiment regarding gun regulation – the vast majority of Americans really do favor sensible gun law.  Too bad we haven’t been able to come up with any.  Too bad the NRA has made it its mission to prevent that very conversation.  At some point, even fence-riding NRA members are going to decide that one too many malls, movie theaters, or schools have been shot up.  At some point, things will become so extreme that the decision will get forced, and so it won’t be as a good a decision as our nation could actually make.

At some point, our gun laws will change and so will the NRA. Will it be forced, and will we take what we get, or will we participate responsibly in the planning for it?

Luth

Out