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I always very much appreciate the work of Stanford Law School Prof. Michael McConnell, one of the very top Religion Clauses scholars in the nation, and am thus delighted to pass along this guest post on the Supreme Court’s ministerial exception oral arguments. (Note that he and I signed the same amicus brief in the case; note also that his and Doug Laycock’s names are quite appropriately listed at the beginning of the signatories’ list, and the rest are in alphabetical order.)

Monday’s argument in the ministerial exception cases, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel, made me realize the cases are more difficult than I had originally thought. Not that the outcome is really in doubt. Especially in light of the Alito-Kagan concurrence in Hosanna-Tabor, there seems to be broad agreement that religious schools have a First Amendment right to choose who will teach the faith to the next generation. But neither side put forward an analytical framework for future cases that gained much traction.

[1.] This is a case that never should have come to the Court. Hosanna-Tabor, a unanimous decision, involved a teacher whose function was almost indistinguishable from that of Morrissey-Berru and Biel, except as to factors, such as title, that should not make a difference (especially under the Alito-Kagan concurrence). The Ninth Circuit decisions in favor of the teachers and against the religious schools appear to have been motivated more by resistance to Hosanna-Tabor than to genuine differences in the cases—the ideological mirror image of the Fifth Circuit’s narrow factual distinction of Whole Woman’s Health in this year’s abortion clinic cases. In ordinary times, we should expect the Courts of Appeals to take their cue from a unanimous Supreme Court, not to confine the Court’s decision to its specific facts.

[2.] Our system of case-by-case constitutional adjudication works best when the case under review itself raises the difficult fault-line issues that need clarification. It does not work well when the case itself is straightforward and the disagreement is over hypotheticals. There is a reason that Article III is confined to actual cases and controversies. Monday’s argument was a splendid illustration of the pitfalls of adjudication by hypothetical.

[3.] The defects in the teachers’ “formalistic” test (their term), based on title and training, were most evident.

Chief Justice Roberts focused (at 54) on the problem that the formal-title approach is manipulable: “if you want broad protection, you just start handing out titles to everybody.” This is a serious problem. It is much less costly to switch titles than to change the responsibilities of a job—even assuming that religious institutions are spending their time trying to avoid application of employment discrimination laws.

But in my opinion, the more serious issue is that different religious faiths have different attitudes toward titles, often for theological reasons. My own denomination, Presbyterianism, deliberately abandoned the title of “priest” to describe the worship leader of the congregation, substituting the less-sacerdotal title of “teaching elder,” precisely because of the Reformed Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers.

Quakers have no ordained clergy at all, but this does not mean they do not have religious leaders or persons performing religious functions. Our Founders, recognizing that Quakers have no “ministers” as such, framed legislation in terms that allowed that denomination to make good-faith judgments for itself about its religious functions.

The term “rabbi” sounds religious to modern ears, but I am told the Hebrew just means “teacher.” In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, young men of good standing in the Church become priests in the Aaronic order at age 12, after going through an ordination ceremony involving the laying on of hands. That does not mean every task they might perform in the Church is a “ministerial” function.

Imams are worship leaders, but in most Islamic communities are not specially trained or ordained. It would be wrong to base constitutional categories on the title on the nametag, when the idea of title varies so widely among faiths.

At one point in the argument, counsel for the teachers, my friend and Stanford colleague Jeff Fisher, seemed to recognize the difficulty. Faced with challenging questions from the Justices about the formal-title rule, he stated that that “we wouldn’t rely solely on titles” and that “[f]unction should be part of the analysis to make sure that you’re not disadvantaging minority religions” (56, 80). Just so. Title might be part of the analysis, so long as consideration of title is sensitive to the particular ecclesiastical context. But it cannot be a “test.”

Respondents’ alternative formalism—an emphasis on training—would be even worse. Controversy over the need (or not) for formal religious training was one of the most prominent flashpoints in the struggle for disestablishment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Old-line Congregationalists (among others) placed great weight on having a “learned clergy,” and worried that unschooled zealots would lead the flock to heretical extremes of “enthusiasm.” Followers of the First Great Awakening disdained professional clergy (whom they called “hireling priests”) and insisted that the gospel must be advanced by preachers who had experienced the saving grace of Jesus Christ, regardless of education. Let us not reintroduce establishmentarian distinctions today that were discarded at the time of the first disestablishments.

The Respondents propounded these formalistic distinctions in a commendable attempt to keep the courts out of the business of making theologically-sensitive, context-specific judgments about religious roles. But their attempt to craft crisp-and-clear criteria ended up treating different religious traditions differently, which violates a core principle of the Religion Clauses.

For reasons explained by Justices Alito and Kagan in their Hosanna-Tabor concurrence, attempts of the formalist variety do not map well onto America’s religious diversity. The problem came to a head during oral argument, when Justice Alito asked Jeff Fisher whether his formal-title test would cover a full-time religion teacher who teaches religion exclusively, but who has no formal title or religious training. Fisher’s response? “That person would probably not be a minister.” (72). This, Justice Kagan said (at 81) “surprised” her. (That is what passes for strong language among the Justices.)

But that would be the inevitable (and unconstitutional) consequence of making title or training a prerequisite for ministerial status: If a religious group doesn’t use the right title or provide the right training, then the government can decide who will, as Justice Kagan said (at 82), “teach religion and … bring up the next generation in important understandings of religious doctrine and practice.”

[4.] Counsel for the schools, my friend Eric Rassbach, got into hot water by sticking to a test of “important religious functions” (language used in both the unanimous opinion in Hosanna-Tabor and the Alito-Kagan concurrence).  He was barraged by questions, even by Justices seemingly sympathetic to his ultimate position, about how courts can determine what religious functions are “important.”

This is a concern of long standing, and there is no clear answer. Justice Scalia reminded the Court that there is a difference between the right to be married in a church and the “practice of throwing rice at church weddings.” (Employment Div. v. Smith.) But how would an outsider know which steps in the preparation of food are “important” to ensure that the meal is kosher? It may even vary from one Jewish community to another. That is why Justice Brennan objected to the requirement of “centrality” in Free Exercise Clause cases. (Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Ass’n.)

Listening to these questions and seeing the inability of able counsel to deal with most of them, it became clear (at least to me) that the Court should not attempt in this case to draw the line. There is no serious doubt that teaching religion on a regular basis to young children is an important religious function. No Justice seemed to doubt that.

Moreover, there are lots of other easy cases out there. Justice Alito’s concurrence in Hosanna-Tabor identified a few—leading the organization, conducting worship services or rituals, and serving as a messenger or teacher of the faith. If such functions are a meaningful part of an employee’s job, there is no need for judicial second-guessing: That person is a “minister.” (Or at least, that person is within the doctrine. I hope the Court will provide a more inclusive terminology.) The large majority of cases under the ministerial exception doctrine over the last three decades have fallen in these easy categories.

The most helpful thing the Court could do at this juncture is to endorse the Alito-Kagan concurrence, thus resolving the easy cases, and not attempt to analyze the more difficult ones in advance or in the abstract. That is the job of the lower courts (assuming they get over any spirit of resistance to the fundamentals of Hosanna-Tabor). Let the cases percolate; let lower courts distinguish one fact pattern from another.

At this point, we don’t know what cases will present themselves. Different functions have different significance in different traditions. Even the same job may be at the core of one congregation’s religious mission—but not another’s. In the church I grew up in, for example, the music director was possibly the most important person in the church for teaching church history and doctrine in way that children and teenagers could appreciate. (I hope you are reading this from heaven, Helen Wick!) In another church, the choir director might be simply someone to teach kids how to sing on pitch. It all depends. That is why the Court should not rush in to supply answers in advance of real cases.

Another reason not to try to answer hard cases in advance is that they may not arise as often as the legal imagination imagines. The Justice rightly worried, for example, about nurses in hospitals run by religious denominations. They (or at least some of them) might present hard line-drawing problems.

But to my knowledge, in the three decades the ministerial exemption has been recognized in the lower courts, not a single hospital has claimed that its nurses are ministers. One reason may be that faith communities care (more than anyone else) about their own religious organization and self-understanding. It would feel creepy for a religious group to call an employee a minister who does not perform an important religious function, just for the purpose of thwarting the anti-discrimination laws. I am not saying it will never happen—just that hard hypotheticals may outnumber real-world controversies. (That has been true of the even harder line-drawing problem of the definition of “religion” under the First Amendment. I bet there have been fifty law review articles for every actual case of a borderline claim to be a “religion.”)

[5.[ One point of notable agreement from yesterday’s argument was abandoning the term “ministerial exception,” and replacing it with a term like “ecclesiastical immunity.” As I explained in an amicus brief, and as Justice Alito emphasized yesterday, that change would be an improvement. Few non-Protestant faiths use the term “minister” for those who teach their faith and guide their choices, and the law’s reliance on it has resulted in some discrimination against minority groups.

Further, the doctrine is not a mere “exception” from certain statutory regimes, but rather a deeper First Amendment “immunity” from state entanglement in core internal church affairs. The Court should take this chance to say so.

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Did Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, suggest that his boss might try to unilaterally (and illegally) reschedule this fall’s presidential election? That’s the way The New York Times portrayed Kushner’s comments, but it is not a fair interpretation.

The Times reports that Kushner “refused on Tuesday to rule out postponing the presidential election in November, a comment that fed directly into Democratic concerns that President Trump might use the coronavirus crisis to delay or delegitimize the contest and one that contradicted Mr. Trump himself.” The headline: “Kushner, Law Aside, Doesn’t Rule Out Delaying 2020 Election.” The subtitle: “The opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held, but his comment played into the concerns of President Trump’s detractors.”

Here is the relevant exchange from Kushner’s interview with Time magazine White House correspondent Brian Bennett:

Bennett: Is there any scenario, including a second outbreak in the fall, where the elections move past November 3rd?

Kushner: That’s too far in the future to tell. Nothing that I’m aware of now, but again, our focus right now is just on getting the country—

Bennett: Will [unintelligible] commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd?

Kushner (laughing): It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other. But right now, that’s the plan, and again, hopefully, by the time we get to September, October, November, we’ve done enough work with testing and with all the different things we’re trying to do to prevent a future outbreak of the magnitude that would make us shut down again. I really believe that once America opens up, it will be very hard for America to ever lock down again.

Note that it was Bennett, not Kushner, who suggested the election might be delayed, and it was Bennett who suggested that the president has the power to do that. Why else ask a representative of the White House to “commit that the elections will happen on November 3rd”?

Far from agreeing with Bennett’s premise, Kushner said, “It’s not my decision to make, so I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other.” The Times story omits the first part of that sentence, making it seem like Kushner was asserting a power he was actually disclaiming. Maybe Kushner meant that the timing of the election is Trump’s decision, but there is no evidence to support that interpretation, other than the suspicion that the president is eager to assert dictatorial powers for his own political benefit in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some things Trump has said—in particular, his dubious assertion of “total” authority over the imposition and lifting of state lockdowns—have reinforced that view. But in practice, he has not actually tried to override state and local responses to the epidemic. To the contrary, many of his critics on the left have argued that the Trump administration should have asserted more authority in this area.

In any case, Trump has explicitly rejected the idea that the epidemic might force a delay of the presidential election. “Are you taking steps to ensure that the general election will happen even if this pandemic has reemerged or hasn’t gone away?” a reporter asked the president during a press briefing last month. Trump’s reply: “The general election will happen on November 3rd.”

In this context, it is rather puzzling that Times reporters Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman thought it was necessary to remind us that “the opinion of a White House staff member has no bearing on when the election is held,” since “even the president himself does not have the authority to unilaterally postpone Election Day, which by law takes place the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.” Their explanation for that civics lesson is a model of anti-Trump hostility masquerading as reporting:

Mr. Kushner’s comment raised alarms both because of the expansive power Mr. Trump has conferred on members of his family who serve in his administration and because it played into the worst anxieties of Mr. Trump’s detractors—that the president would begin to question the validity of the election if he feared he was going to lose.

The presumptive Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., gave voice to those concerns at a virtual fund-raiser last month. “Mark my words, I think he is going to try to kick back the election somehow—come up with some rationale why it can’t be held,” he said.

For the president’s most vociferous opponents, pretty much anything he or his underlings say “raise[s] alarms.” When those alarms are false, as this one seems to be, the job of serious reporters is not to amplify them but to present the relevant facts.

In the 10th paragraph of the story, we get this response from Kushner:

On Tuesday night, Mr. Kushner sought to clarify his earlier interview. “I have not been involved in, nor am I aware of, any discussions about trying to change the date of the presidential election,” he said. A White House official said Mr. Kushner was fully aware that the date was set by federal law.

In other words, the whole premise of the Times story, which was based on Kushner’s purported “hedge about the date of the election” (as Karni and Haberman put it), seems to be fundamentally faulty.

Last month, Haberman, who covers the White House for the Times, co-wrote an opinion piece disguised as a news story that portrayed Trump as vain, petty, irresponsible, and self-obsessed. While I think that description, which was based on a content analysis of Trump’s comments during COVID-19 briefings, is pretty accurate, the president’s supporters probably would disagree. That sort of blatant bias, along with the subtler but still obvious bias epitomized by the Kushner story, shows that the president is right to view many of the reporters who cover him as political opponents.

That reality does not mean all of Trump’s frequently unhinged complaints about the press are valid. There is a crucial distinction between reporting facts that make the president uncomfortable and manufacturing facts to fit a preconceived view of him. Does the Times understand the difference?

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From Judge C.J. Williams’ decision yesterday in NuStar Farms, LLC v. Lizza (N.D. Iowa):

On January 16, 2020, plaintiffs filed a complaint in this Court alleging a single count of defamation. Paragraph 14 of the complaint alleges that the article “makes the following false and defamatory statements about Plaintiffs” and then lists 16 bullet points constituting the statements plaintiffs allege are false and defamatory (“the statements”):

• “So why did [Devin Nunes’] parents and brother cover their tracks after quietly moving the farm to Iowa? Are they hiding something politically explosive? On the ground in Iowa, Esquire searched for the truth—and discovered a lot of paranoia and hypocrisy”. [Other bullet points included later in this post. -EV]

… Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(e), “[a] party may move for a more definite statement of a pleading to which a responsive pleading is allowed but which is  so vague or ambiguous that the party cannot reasonably prepare a response.” “A motion under Rule 12(e) is designed to strike at unintelligibility in a pleading rather than want of detail.” …

Defendants argue that plaintiffs’ complaint fails to identify “what aspect(s) of each statement is supposedly false and defamatory, and … what Plaintiffs allege the truth of the matter to be.” Plaintiffs contend that it is enough for the complaint to simply allege that the statements are false, and defendants can seek the factual details they want through discovery. As a preliminary matter, the Court finds that plaintiffs must allege facts that, if proven, would show the statements to be false. It is not enough for plaintiffs to list a number of statements and generally declare them to be false without alleging facts which, if proven, would show them to be false.

To determine if plaintiffs’ complaint has met the minimal pleading requirement such that defendants can answer the complaint and defend against the claim, the Court must carefully examine the allegedly false statements in the article. [Long and detailed discussion omitted.—ed.] …

The tedious and laborious exercise of dissecting each of the sixteen bullet points illustrates the deficiency of plaintiffs’ complaint. The complaint is not at all clear as to which facts asserted in these bullet points plaintiffs allege are actually false. Knowing which assertions plaintiffs allege are false is necessary for defendants to be able to answer the complaint and assert a defense. As the Court pointed out as it addressed each bullet point, some of the alleged facts may be defended as opinions or conclusions, others may be defended as not concerning plaintiffs, and still others may be defended as being true. Without knowing which of the facts plaintiffs allege are actually false, defendants are left not knowing how to answer the complaint.

The exercise also shows that the complaint fails to allege facts which, if proven, would show that any of the alleged facts are false. In short, the Court finds this is one of the rare instances when a more definite statement is required under Rule 12(e). Although defendants have urged the Court to dismiss the complaint outright under Rule 12(b)(6), to do so here would require the Court to guess as to what exactly plaintiffs are claiming are the false statements. Even if the Court granted such a motion at this stage, it would be a dismissal without prejudice allowing plaintiffs leave to file an amended complaint to allege facts that would state a claim. Without knowing precisely what plaintiffs are claiming, the Court cannot say that plaintiffs are incapable of alleging facts which, if proven, would state a defamation claim against defendants.

The Court fully understands that in determining whether a publication is defamatory, the Court must view the publication as a whole. The Court also understands that plaintiffs are proceeding at least in part on a theory of implied defamation by juxtaposition.  Yet, for defendants to be able to answer the complaint, or for this Court   to analyze whether the complaint is subject to dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6) because it fails to state a claim, it is first necessary that the complaint itself be intelligible.

The complaint needs to state whether it is alleging specific facts are false, and if so, which ones and why. If plaintiffs’ entire theory of recovery is that the article as a whole is defamatory by implication, then the complaint needs to allege which facts or omissions are juxtaposed with other facts or omissions so as to lead to a false assertion of fact, and allege facts which, if proven, would show the implied assertion of fact to be false….

Here are Nunes’ other bullet points:

• “Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007 [W]hat is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade”.
• “Why would the Nuneses, Steve King, and an obscure dairy publication all conspire to hide the fact that the congressman’s family sold its farm and moved to Iowa?”
• “As he walked to his truck, [Tony] looked back and warned me: ‘If I see you again, I’m gonna get upset.’ Apparently Sibley’s First Amendment training hadn’t filtered down to all its residents”.
• “Other dairy farmers in the area helped me understand why the Nunes family might be so secretive about the farm: Midwestern diaries tend to run on undocumented labor”.
• “In the heart of Steve King’s district … the economy is powered by workers that King and Trump have threatened to deport. I checked Anthony Nunes ‘s campaign donor history. The only federal candidate he has ever donated to, besides his son, is King ($250 in 2012). He also gives to the local Republican party of Osceola County, which, records show, transfers money into King’s congressional campaigns”.
• “The absurdity of this situation – funding and voting for politicians whose core promise is to implement immigration policies that would destroy their livelihoods – has led some of the Republican-supporting dairymen to rethink their political priorities”.
• “‘They are immigrants and Devin is a strong supporter of Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump wants to shut down all of the immigration, and here is his family benefiting from immigrant labor’, documented or not”.
• “I had a particularly sensitive interview that afternoon with a source who I knew would be taking a risk by talking to me about immigration and labor at NuStar. When I arrived, we talked for a few minutes before the source’s cell phone suddenly The conversation seemed strained. “Sí, aquí está,” the source said. I learned that on the other end of the phone was a man named Flavio, who worked at NuStar. Somehow Flavio knew exactly where I was and whom I was talking to. He warned my source to end the conversation. Not only was I being followed, but I was also being watched, and my sources were being contacted by NuStar”.
• “I left and drove to the local grocery store, where I parked in the open, hoping to draw out whoever was tailing I suddenly noticed a man in jeans, a work shirt, and a baseball cap pulled down low. He was talking on his cell phone and walking suspiciously. Was he watching me? I held up a camera to take pictures and he darted away. I followed. His car was parked haphazardly on the side of the road half a block away. He got in and took off while I followed. It was a dark Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck—with California license plates …. The guy in the pickup truck with California plates was, of course, … Anthony Jr”.
• Devin Nunes “and his parents seemed to have concealed basic facts about the family’s move to Iowa. It was suspicious”.
• “There was no doubt about why I was being According to two sources with firsthand knowledge, NuStar did indeed rely, at least in part, on undocumented labor. One source, who was deeply connected in the local Hispanic community, had personally sent undocumented workers to Anthony Nunes Jr.’s farm for jobs … asserting that the farm was aware of their status”.
• “I laid out the facts I had uncovered in Sibley, including the intimidation of sources …, and asked him for ‘I’d tell that story,’ he said. He paused and added, ‘We’re a sanctuary church, if you need a place to stay. You’re safe here!'”
• “I learned that Anthony Jr. was seemingly starting to panic. The next day, the 2009 Dairy Star article about NuStar, the one that made me think the Nuneses were hiding something and that had led me to Sibley in the first place, was removed from the Dairy Star’s website”.
• “Is it possible the Nuneses have nothing to be seriously concerned about? Of course, but I never got the chance to ask because Anthony … did not respond to numerous requests for interviews”.
• “The relationship between the Iowa dairy farmers and their undocumented employees is indeed fraught”.

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When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined the nation’s long-term fiscal state last year, it offered this dour assessment: Federal debt levels were on track to reach their highest levels since shortly after World War II. On the current trajectory, “growing budget deficits would boost federal debt drastically over the next 30 years,” pushing debt to levels that were “the highest in the nation’s history by far.” Interest payments were set to spike, tripling over the next several decades, and exceeding the total amount of all discretionary spending. Over time, debt service would essentially become its own massive federal program.

Even under favorable scenarios, in which productivity growth remained steady and interest rates remained low, debt levels would continue to rise and rise. “The prospect of such high and rising debt poses substantial risks for the nation and presents policymakers with significant challenges.” Among the risks and challenges: “High debt might cause policymakers to feel restrained from implementing deficit-financed fiscal policy to respond to unforeseen events.” Here is my thinking face emoji.

What the nonpartisan congressional budget analysts were saying, in their own carefully antiseptic language, was that even if things went pretty well for the economy, the continued growth of federal debt was going to be a big problem. A crisis was brewing, perhaps not immediately, but in the long term.

You may have noticed: Things have not gone well.

As COVID-19 spreads, the American economy is in the midst of the largest freefall in at least a generation, perhaps the most devastating since the Great Depression. Joblessness is at record highs, and financial analysts are predicting that the economy will end up shrinking by as much as 40 percent during the second quarter this year. A sharp drop in health care spending, as people delay elective surgeries and other non-emergency care, has alone managed to trim several points from the gross domestic product. No one has any clear sense of how or when this will end. 

As the economy has tanked, Congress has responded with a series of aid packages totaling nearly $3 trillion, all of which have been deficit-financed. This year’s budget deficit is expected to come in somewhere around $4 trillion, nearly the size of last year’s entire federal budget. In April, the U.S. posted its highest monthly budget deficit ever, at $737.9 billion. In 2016, the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the annual deficit was $585 billion. In a single 30 day period, the U.S. government ran a bigger budget deficit than any one year outside of the Great Recession and its aftermath. 

And this year isn’t over: Yesterday, Democrats unveiled a new $3 trillion relief package, offering billions in bailout funds to state budgets and the post office, along with another round of stimulus checks for most households. Progressives complained the bill wasn’t large enough. 

The bill isn’t expected to pass, however, at least not in its current form. And the reason why is something the CBO warned about: High debt levels appear to be causing policy makers “to feel restrained from implementing deficit-financed fiscal policy to respond to unforeseen events.” Republicans in both Congress and the White House are balking at the price tag, in part because it would come on top of a debt and deficit outlook that was already worrisome. 

I have criticized the major fiscal stimulus bills under both the Bush and Obama administrations. But there is at least a case to be made that this crisis, which is different in both scale and kind from previous economic upheavals, is one that actually justifies some amount of emergency deficit spending, if not the particular bills that Congress has passed: When governments are forcing businesses to close in response to an unforeseeable exogenous event, as well as forcing individuals to stay home from work, some form of recompense is probably justified. It is notable that the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, one of the organizations most single-mindedly focused on national debt reduction, has backed deficit spending in this instance. 

Yet the relief effort is running up against legislative skepticism—a political constraint imposed by the high debt and deficits that were already locked in before the crisis began. 

I don’t mean to endorse the House Democrats’ bill, which is at least in part an effort to use the current crisis to push the party’s pre-crisis priorities. And there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the relief legislation that has already been passed; the contradictory design and dysfunctional implementation of the previous relief bills should give anyone wishing for trillions more real pause. 

Congress needs to keep emergency relief simple and direct. Get universal monthly cash payments to the people. Don’t put a good idea into a bad bill with a dozen convoluted ideas that are counterproductive and costly. Get money to the people and let them decide what to do with it.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) May 7, 2020

There’s blame to go around for the fiscal mess: Republicans shoulder much of the responsibility for the preexisting conditions of the nation’s fiscal health, although Democrats have certainly contributed plenty over the years as well. But partisan blame is, at the moment, somewhat beside the point. 

It is certainly possible that additional deficit-financed relief legislation will pass in the coming months. But the current challenge is real: Decades of rising debt and deficits, even under thriving economic scenarios where persistently high deficit levels are unjustified, have left lawmakers across the aisle less willing or able to respond, exactly as budget-watchers have predicted. The debt is not just a drag on the economy. It’s a burden on crisis response, a limitation on the government’s ability to take action in a time of need. 

For years, the risks associated with long-term fiscal imbalances have mostly been seen as potential threats down the road rather than real, immediate challenges. But those risks have now materialized dramatically as short-term challenges. The long-term problems are exacerbating our near-term crisis. 

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