Congress Doesn'T Like Making Hard Choices

If you were paying attention to the end-game of the debt-ceiling negotiations in Washington, you may have noticed something interesting. For all the partisan division over the details, there was agreement on one point: It's safest politically to defer hard choices to the last possible moment — and maybe avoid them altogether.

Democrats and Republicans offered proposals that avoided the details of cutting budgets or increasing revenues. They suggested commissions and committees that would make the hard choices for them; they favored caps on spending, without saying how caps would be enforced; they floated the idea that the President could unilaterally raise the debt ceiling, allowing Congress to avoid the entire problem; they favored voting on a balanced-budget amendment, which is a way of telling voters you're for a balanced budget without actually being held accountable for the hard choices that produce one.