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 6th 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
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