The trouble with Olympia Snowe's "trigger" compromise

More on the history of how triggers have been tried in the past - the public is always the ones being shot.

The idea of a legislative trigger to get Congress to do later something that it doesn't want to do now is not new. Such triggers have an excellent track record of demonstrating resolve where none exists. But as a policy mechanism, they have nearly always failed.

Read it all at Slate Magazine