Headlee Does the Samba

Brazil seems to be taking a page out of teen years, as they've passed a constitutional amendment to cap government spending at current levels.

The project, known in Brazil as PEC 55, freezes expenditure in the executive, judiciary and legislative branches of power, allowing them to grow only by the rate of inflation in the previous year.

Folks on the left, who want the size of government to grow, don't like it; it doesn't help matters that they impeached a leftist president earlier in the year, so the left is in an ornery mood to begin with.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets during the Senate session to protest against the austerity plan.

After the vote, many demonstrations descended into violence.

In Brasilia, masked protesters set fire to a bus and marched on the local offices of Globo TV, which they say is biased towards [new president] Mr Temer's government. But the marchers were blocked by riot police.

The teen years part flows from 1978, when Michigan, following the anti-tax mood that most famously gave us California's Proposition 13, passed the Headlee Amendment, which stated that "... the state’s total revenue cannot exceed 9.49 percent of personal income in Michigan." If memory serves, that figure was the current figure in 1978. It also put in rules limiting what would come to be known as unfunded mandates in the early 90s and on mandating local votes on local tax increases.

Michigan has function reasonably well with that in place and has stayed on the books for almost four decades. Liberals have grumbled about it, especially in the early going, but it has settled in to the political rules of the game.

A majority of the voters can rewrite the constitution in Michigan, but Brazil's needs a 60% majority of both houses. That might be hard for the left to undo, but if a crisis that needs a bigger government goes down, such a supermajority could be conjured up to undo it. In the US, 60% (60 votes to be technical, but that's 60% if everyone shows) is the threshold needed to break a filibuster in the Senate, so that's a manageable hurdle to undo this in the future.

It's a bit of a hardball trick for the right, but hard-wiring policy into the constitution is a common trick in many state constitutions; Michigan, for example, makes public worker's pensions untouchable, something that came into play with the Detroit bankruptcy.