There’s nothing quite like the sensation of waiting for a socialist government to do the smart thing fiscally, but Greece-watchers are reasonably confident that the Papandreou deficit-reduction plan will pass when put to a vote on Thursday. But even if the legislators all fall in line, there’s another problem facing Plan Papandreou: the Greek courts, which may decide that the program is unconstitutional.

… Despite the giveaways that may find IMF and EU resistance, another issue on the horizon is whether some aspects of this legislation will be deemed unconstitutional by local courts. One of the measures in the proposed bill likely to be quashed by the judiciary is that public servants and private sector employees can be insured by an amalgamated pension and health-care fund.
And if there are many more articles that fall foul of Greek constitutional strictures, the socialist legislative branch of government may be check-mated by a judicial coup. Then the government could find itself back to square one in relation to its toughest austerity measures — even if all its deputies tow the party line.

It is uncomfortably easy to imagine a similar scenario playing out in the United States in ten years. How do you say “Antonin Scalia” in Greek?

Speaking of things Italian, if all goes well in Greece, Justice Scalia’s ancestral homeland will be moving into the international crosshairs next. Italy has done some things right — like keeping its deficit relatively low by not engaging in massive stimulus spending — but it went into the crisis with such a high debt-to-GDP ratio that it is still struggling. The word “default” is being thrown around by responsible people:

“A default is a distinct possibility,” said the managing director of Capital Markets, Roger Bootle, and its chief European economist, Jonathan Loynes, in a report.
Its banks would be hard hit and foreign investors faced losses of €400 million if Italy defaulted.
Italy has fared better than other markets, such as Spain and Portugal, since Greece’s crisis. It limited its stimulus spending and emerged from the recession with a budget deficit of 5.3 per cent of GDP, less than half that of Spain and Greece, but it still boosted government debt to 115.8 per cent of GDP.

So the world is waiting for Greek socialists to enact social-spending restraints and for fiscal Puritanism to catch on in Italy. Okey-dokey.

In other news of the non-obviously self-evident: Ezra Klein thinks that we’ve got this deficit thing licked in the United States, just so long as Congress doesn’t mess it up. No, really. He writes: “Either Congress can pass and implement policies that will bring the long-term deficit under control or it can’t. Those are the only two choices here. But there’s no real mechanism for getting the deficit under control aside from Congress passing laws and then sticking to them.” Well, raise my rent.

It’s hard to disagree with Klein’s analysis here, except for the part where he assumes there’s a reasonable chance of the U.S. Congress not being populated by jackasses.