Friday morning under a cloudless sky and a baking sun, Rich Nugent — the sheriff-turned-congressman from Brooksville — renewed the Jeffersonian argument. Astride the northside steps of the historic Pasco County Courthouse, the freshman Republican lashed himself to the founder of the Democratic Party to decry America's "crushing debt" and promote what he calls the only feasible solution: a balanced-budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
A sloshing ocean of red ink — more than $14 trillion now and rising to above $16 trillion by the end of 2012 — will submerge, for the first time since World War II, America's gross domestic product. Being underwater, Nugent declared, "affects not only us, but our children and our grandchildren." Beating still air with makeshift hand fans, a shirtsleeve audience of about 90 nodded in agreement.
Nugent had come, he said, to "this historic place" to match a historic moment. As a result of the whimsically titled "Budget Control Act of 2011" — last month's legislation that postponed, at best, our debt-ceiling Armageddon — both houses of Congress must vote on a balanced-budget amendment by New Year's Eve.
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