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By Edward Zelinsky

Like most Connecticut residents, I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror the trial of Steven J. Hayes. Hayes is one of two defendants accused of the particularly gruesome home invasion murders in July, 2007 in suburban Cheshire, Connecticut. Hayes has been found guilty; the jury has sentenced Hayes to receive the death penalty.

Like everyone who followed this trial, I have both admired and sympathized with Dr. William Petit, Jr. whose wife and two daughters were brutalized and killed by Hayes. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Petit wanted the death penalty in this case as would I had I been in Dr. Petit‘s position. So compelling have been the facts exposed at Hayes’ trial that many normally outspoken opponents of the death penalty have remained silent as the jury assigned that penalty to Hayes for his truly evil crimes.

During the Hayes trial, I also spent much time thinking about Ricardo Beamon. Mr. Beamon too was killed in July, 2007 in Connecticut. Mr. Beamon had led a troubled inner-city life which he had turned around by founding, in the words of the New Haven Register, a “high-end urban clothing” store. Mr. Beamon, who left a two year old daughter, was killed in a robbery. In a plea agreement, Mr. Beamon’s murderer agreed to a twenty year prison sentence. Mr. Beamon’s murder has occasioned relatively little public attention.

Undoubtedly, distinctions can be drawn between these two cases. However, the similarities are great as well. Both the members of the Petit family and Mr. Beamon are gone, leaving their respective loved ones to grieve for their undeserved losses.

In this context, I have been thinking as well of my nephew Brandon who was killed last summer by a negligent car driver. I am angry about the loss inflicted on us. If I could, I would like to take matters into my own hands. Instead, he will receive a prison sentence and then resume his life. Our loss is no less because the individual who killed Brandon acted negligently, rather than intentionally.

Under these circumstances, I cannot say that we inflict the ultimate penalty of death in a principled fashion.

One other family member has influenced me as I mull these issues, my late uncle, Justice Seymour F. Simon of the Illinois Supreme Court. Seymour was a consistent dissenter in his court’s death penalty cases. The legal basis for his dissent was, at one level, quite technical, namely, that the Illinois death penalty statute permits excessive prosecutorial discretion and violates the separation-of-powers provision of the Illinois state constitution.

However, Seymour came to be a profound critic of capital punishment. Seymour did not oppose the death penalty out of a soft-minded sympathy for those who commit horrible crimes. Rather, sitting atop a large state judicial system, he became convinced that we inflict the death penalty in an unprincipled manner.

I suspect that, when she grows up, Ms. Beamon will agree.

I can’t oppose the death penalty in all cases. Capital punishment was appropriate at Nuremberg. The Israelis were right to hang Adolf Eichmann. If we catch Osama bin Laden, I would favor, in Abe Lincoln’s famous phrase, hanging him like Haman “upon the gallows of [his] own building.”

But short of these cases,

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By Edward Zelinsky

The United States is in the midst of a “free lunch” campaign in which Republicans and Democrats alike promise painless resolution of our budgetary problems. As a result, neither party will have an electoral mandate for the hard choices necessary to tackle our fiscal quandaries. Both parties are squandering an important opportunity to mold public opinion and set the stage for meaningful budgetary discipline.

In a recent survey of the U.S. economy, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded, with considerable understatement, that “the United States faces challenging budgetary prospects.”

This conclusion should surprise no one. The history and current reality are there for all to see: In 2001 and 2003, the Bush Administration and Congress reduced federal income taxes significantly. Instead of decreasing federal spending to pay for these tax reductions, the Bush Administration presided over significant increases of military and domestic outlays as well as unrestrained growth of so-called “entitlement” spending – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. The Obama Administration has continued and exacerbated this trend. At the state and local levels of government, budgetary prospects often even worse as unfunded pension obligations and unfinanced retiree health benefits balloon.

To be sure, there is much contemporary political rhetoric about the need for fiscal discipline. President Obama has appointed a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Tea Party candidates successfully exploit growing public anxiety about budgetary deficits.

However, none of this should be taken too seriously. President Obama’s deficit commission is scheduled to report only after this November’s elections. We have become inured to public images of Tea Party activists denouncing federal spending – except for their own Social Security and Medicare payments. The House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” promises fiscal responsibility while also refusing to reduce defense spending or spending which affects seniors.

The net result has been a free lunch campaign in which Democrats and Republicans alike promise budgetary discipline but refuse to specify how they will achieve it. The bi-partisan message to the electorate is that public deficits can be controlled without pain.

This, of course, is untrue.

Undoubtedly, it is considered wise politics to promise tax reductions and vague spending restraints while ignoring the tough choices necessary to put our budgetary house in order. However, in the long run, the promise of a free lunch will prove to be poor politics.

Empty, anodyne campaigns result in elections without mandates. Postponing the real discussion until after the election forfeits the opportunity to establish an electoral basis for the painful actions necessary to eliminate federal and state budget deficits.

In ordinary times, off-year elections are low key affairs in which the President’s party typically loses some or all of the congressional seats it gained in the prior presidential election. Conventionally, such off-year elections are preceded by locally-oriented campaigns.

However, these are not ordinary times. We are barely recovering from the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s and confront current and projected budgetary deficits of unprecedented magnitude. In this historically unique setting, the 2010 campaign is an opportunity for the two parties to form electoral mandates by specifying how they wil

By Edward Zelinsky

Certain opponents of President Obama’s effort to revise the U.S. medical system claimed that the President sought “death panels” to deny medical care. Among those decrying such “death panels” was Governor Palin.

President Obama quickly disclaimed any desire to create such panels. The President said he favored permitting Medicare to pay for purely voluntary physician counseling about end-of-life choices. Using the unfortunate metaphor which came to dominate this discussion, President Obama affirmed that he does not want to “pull the plug on Grandma because we’ve decided that it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.”

This debate was apparently resolved when Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, declared that any federal health care legislation will omit provisions concerning end-of-life counseling. This outcome, now seemingly endorsed by Republicans and Democrats alike, suggests that the United States can provide unlimited medical resources to the elderly during their final illnesses.

Regrettably, this debate obscured larger and more difficult truths: We do not have unlimited resources. No society does. We cannot afford to spend indefinite amounts on the care of the terminally ill, particularly as the large Baby Boomer cohort queues up to meet the Grim Reaper. We consequently need death panels to control medical costs. We already have such panels although we don’t openly label them as such.

There are many reasons that the United States’ outlays for medical care outstrip those of other nations. Among these reasons are our enormous expenditures for medical treatment at the end of life. Roughly thirty percent of Medicare’s expenditures occur within the patient’s last year of life.

Some of this care is palliative and thus relatively inexpensive. Some of this care is for patients who die unexpectedly. However, the American medical system provides aggressive treatment at the end of life which other nations do not. There is no way for us to reduce the burden of medical costs without curbing these end-of-life outlays for aggressive care.

Much political rhetoric on reducing medical costs implies that such cost cutting can be painless. Various formulas (“administrative costs,” “bureaucracy,” “ineffective care”) make cost cutting sound anodyne. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives have all avoided the unpleasant realities: Medical care costs cannot be controlled without denying services to somebody. Zealous end-of-life treatment is expensive, a prime candidate for cost control.

Every major hospital and medical institution today has an ethics panel. Such panels often address end-of-life issues, advising physicians and other caregivers when to terminate treatment. These are “death panels,” authoritative bodies which often conclude that treatment of the terminally ill should be discontinued.

Flippant references to pulling-the-plug on grandma resonate with me personally since, twelve weeks ago, I became a first time grandfather. That makes me part of the class which President Obama and Governor Palin apparently want to guarantee unlimited access to Medicare resources at the end of life.

Speaking as a new grandfather, there is another perspective I urge on the President and his Republican opponents: my grandson’s. My grandson is a lucky child, born into a loving family that lives in a great nation. But on the negative side of the ledger, his generation inherits a national debt which threatens its economic future.

We must do many things to put our economic house in order for my grandson and his peers. Controlling medical costs is one of them. Sometime, hopefully far in the future, that may indeed require pulling the plug on his grandfather when it is no longer sensible to treat his final illness. Death is a part of life. In a world of finite resources, “death panels” are and should be part of our national effort to control medical costs.