I’ve heard some chatter that were Timothy Geithner to step down, Laura Tyson might replace him as Treasury Secretary but it’s clear from what she’s wrote today that she’s far too sensible to be confirmed:

But with substantial excess capacity in the economy, there is no evidence that the federal deficit is driving up interest rates and crowding out private spending. What’s slowing the pace of recovery is not too much government borrowing but too little private spending. [...] The primary cause of the jobs crisis is a lack of demand, the same problem that bedeviled the economy in the 1930s. Consumers, long the primary engine of economic growth in the United States, are in the midst of an unprecedented retrenchment. [...] But the overwhelming evidence suggests the opposite: when the economy has excess capacity, high unemployment and weak private demand, cuts in government spending reduce growth and eliminate jobs. [...] But in the next few years, the priorities of fiscal policy should be growth and jobs.

Crazy talk.

Excellent news today from Radley Balko:

After 10 years of incarceration, and seven years after a jury sentenced him to die, 30-year-old Cory Maye will soon be going home. Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Prentiss Harrell signed a plea agreement Friday morning in which Maye pled guilty to manslaughter for the 2001 death of Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer Ron Jones, Jr.

Per the agreement, Harrell then sentenced Maye to 10 years in prison, time he has now already served. Maye will be taken to Rankin County, Mississippi, for processing and some procedural work. He is expected to be released within days.

Maye’s story, a haunting tale about race, the rural south, the excesses of the drug war, the inequities of the criminal justice system and a father’s instincts to protect his daughter, caught fire across the Internet and the then-emerging blogging world when I first posted the details on my own blog in late 2005.

You should read the whole story. It’s really amazing stuff. Obviously Balko doesn’t want to toot his own horn too much here, but it appears that he saved an innocent man’s life in a completely extraordinary way.

As people continue to debate the legal issues surrounding the possibility that President Obama will simply cite constitutional considerations and refuse to abide by the statutory debt limit, one thing I want to bring into view is the fact that the legal dubiousness of this has to be weighed against the legal dubiousness of the other options. The conventional idea is that absent a debt ceiling increase, the Treasury Department should stop issuing new debt and start a process of payment prioritization by which the administration decides which bills get paid and which don’t get paid.

This, however, seems to me to be illegal. The law says that senior citizens are entitled to their Social Security checks. The law says that funds have been appropriated for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Federal employees have contracts. Federal contractors also have contracts. It’s not clear that anyone would have standing to sue if Obama refused to abide by the debt ceiling. But it seems perfectly clear that if the government promised to pay you to do some work, and then just doesn’t pay you that you have grounds for a legal complaint. The president must “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” and the appropriations bills are real laws. Congress passed them. What you have here is a conflict between the government’s legal obligation to pay money and the government’s legal obligation to cease issuing new debts. Either path seems about equally arbitrary and illegal. The issue, after all, is that congress has passed contradictory laws. The tax code raises so much revenue, but legally authorized expenditures require so much money, and legally authorized borrowing doesn’t cover the gap. So what’s a president to do?