Jim Kirby: At what point does an understandable desire for restitution need to be separated from simple recognition? Or should that never happen? USA recognition of its former enemies has historically not been prohibited solely on the basis of a demand for restitution. Even recognition of Germany after WWII did not result in a general repatriation or restitution to people who left the country or forfeited property via the Nuremberg laws. Would you advocate any kind of time limit on the tying of recognition to restitution?

Neilehat: I think you're overlooking something that has really changed in recent years. The past few terms have been notable for SCOTUS excoriation of Congress. Last term, the Court actually granted standing to a minority group of Congress-folk who brought suit -- at taxpayer expense -- when the Executive branch refused to defend a law that lower courts had found unconstitutional. Clearly, the Court's role in resolving an issue that Congress and the White House could not was consistent with their assigned role, but the Congress was acting in a new capacity by forcing upon the SCOTUS a new role as referee on issues that don't even involve legislation, but merely political spats. As a liberal, I virtually never agree with Scalia on the face of social issues, but I completely concurred with him that the Court's decision to grant standing in this case was "jaw-dropping".

I can't quite agree that the US is ungovernable, but your recommendation that the Executive be able to void state laws strikes opposing chords for me. There is no doubt that states have entered a new era of passing laws that violate federal supremacy, apparently on the theory that by encouraging other states to act similarly, they will force a federal retreat on an issue that should not even have to ascend to the SCOTUS. On the other hand, expanding the Executive's power at this level sounds like an excellent way to turbo-charge another trend that is at least as new and troubling as the state problem --Congress' tendency to do the same thing as the states ... which in turn has created a super-judiciary that acts as arbiter between the Judiciary and the Executive, and that doesn't appear to like that role.

Hi Jack : Re: "WERE we to elect all of our House members at large, we'd ... have gerried a number of rural, umm....... rustics? out of their seats and moved the body closer to a fairly literate center." That actually sounds to me like a possibility. But an opposing idea strikes me too: wouldn't some candidate from the state be courting the rural/agricultural areas -- meaning that they would built a de facto constituency out of multiple non-contiguous areas?

Jack: I think you missed a turn when you characterized my district-less state pipe-dream as being non-representative. The Constitution doesn't identify a district as a necessity, probably because the popular election of House members satisfied that criterion. (The fact that the Constitution requires an election to fill a vacated House seat would seem to emphasize that requirement for state-level representativeness.) I agree that the range of consequences of multi-member, district-free voting include some frightening possibilities, but thinking about them does point out the advantages of district-free voting for a single member. In general, at-large candidates would seek votes at the level of the constituency whose support they seek. For an entertainer or religious figure, that might be statewide, non-political venues. For a major employer, that might be several localities. For a basic vanilla congressman, that would likely be close to home. To me, actually sounds like a more representative electoral process than district-based voting. By confining people to selecting by district -- a logistical convenience that arose out of transportation issues from past centuries -- and by placing control over the shape of those districts in the hands of people whose interest is non-representatives, States have actually managed to sidestep the Constitution's very ill-defined interest in representativeness.

It is kind of interesting to wonder what would happen if a state were to simply decide that no congressional districts at all would be drawn. All voters would have the chance to pick =/< [total number of seats]. Or to allow residents to choose which district they wish to vote in. There seems no compelling reason to force people into congressional districts, or to force candidates to limit their accountability to an artificially-selected piece of the state. Logistically, both have problems, but then gerrymandered districts seem to producing more extreme consequences than existed even at the time of Baker v. Carr. Politically, both are equivalent to a non-violent overthrow of incumbents and political delegations, of course, hence unlikely. Still, any discussion of how important it is for people to vote is not complete if it eliminates the topic of who ought to make the decision about which candidates one is required to choose from.

Two thoughts on this very provocative column. First, as others have noted, life-expectancy has not changed equally for the various groups collecting SS. So, your proposal's attempt at basic fairness requires that it be based on a different number. (Parenthetically, there is some room for doubt that an individual's life expectancy itself has changed all that much, as opposed to improvements in public record keeping that determines a collective life expectancy.) In addition, until fairly recently, most social security recipients had not worked, hence contributed, for their entire working lives, and were paid by a different maximum benefit computation than the one used today. So the premise that we are currently overpaying retirees demands some complex documentation -- probably from the GAO. Second, if SS' initial intent was to encourage older workers to move outside the workforce, and if the program is doing that even now, then the numbers in #1 above are absolutely critical to establishing the need to move the average retirement age up by 4 years. In reality the number may not be 4, but 6, or 1, or -1. The missing element in your proposal, tho, is whether the goal is to simply keep SS solvent in the long term or to roll it back. In your last line, you deny both outcomes. So, I'm not sure what it is that you are advocating, and have insufficient numbers to evaluate whether your proposal is a reasonable way to achieve any outcome at all.

Salutations, Bennet. Agree with your reasoning ... but with one footnote. I proposed the 73d Congress because it approved the 21st Amendment to repeal Prohibition. I still presume that invalidation of all the acts of the 73d Congress would extend to that action, raising yet another (tho admittedly absurd) SCOTUS question regarding limits on Congressional power to repeal otherwise permissible prior acts.

I agree with Judge Posner that the debt ceiling law is an inherent violation of separation of powers. While I also agree that Bennet's argument that collateral constraint is an appropriate approach to Congressional intent, I disagree that it applies here, since a debt ceiling, once breached, imposes on the Executive Branch the requirement to decide which bills to pay, hence which laws to consider intact, and which to consider dead. This effectively nullifies prior Congressional action without benefit of a vote, a law, or a veto. As reductio ad absurdem I would submit that if the current Congress passed a law invalidating all acts of the 73'd Congress (including the repeal of Prohibition), that law -- even with a Presidential signature -- would be unconstitutional and invalid on the same grounds, and at the same time would permit no reasonable way to apply the principle of collateral constraint.