The real debt ceiling crime is not that the agreement finally passed by the House contains no revenue raisers, nor that it cuts trillions at a time of recession and double-digit unemployment (let's not kid ourselves), nor that the Democratic party has proven itself horrible at 'negotiation', nor the damage to American bonds' reputation, nor any other detail of the deal or the politics preceding it.
The fact of the matter, is in the past month, you had the President, the House, and the Senate, all scrambling, against their will, to meet a deadline to satisfy an informal institution, the "bond market", which is an informal social construction neither created nor answerable to the American people. The Founding Fathers created the office of the President, and the houses of Congress, to be the Highest Authority of the Land, and for precisely that reason ensured that they were chosen by election. Nowhere in the Constitution nor any social contract nor any expression of political philosophy written from the Enlightenment to today is the "Bond Market" appointed as the wellspring of legitimate of power.
Yet this past month has revealed that it is.
