  We reply to the recent criticism by Garriga and Tanaka of our proposal that
quantum gravitational loop corrections may lead to a secular screening of the
effective cosmological constant. Their argument rests upon a renormalization
scheme in which the composite operator $(R \sqrt{-g} - 4 \Lambda \sqrt{-g}
)_{\rm ren}$ is defined to be the trace of the renormalized field equations.
Although this is a peculiar prescription, we show that it {\it does not
preclude secular screening}. Moreover, we show that a constant Ricci scalar
{\it does not even classically} imply a constant expansion rate. Other
important points are: (1) the quantity $R_{\rm ren}$ of Garriga and Tanaka is
neither a properly defined composite operator, nor is it constant; (2) gauge
dependence does not render a Green's function devoid of physical content; (3)
scalar models on a non-dynamical de Sitter background (for which there is no
gauge issue) can induce arbitrarily large secular contributions to the stress
tensor; (4) the same secular corrections appear in observable quantities in
quantum gravity; and (5) the prospects seem good for deriving a simple
stochastic formulation of quantum gravity in which the leading secular effects
can be summed and for which the expectation values of even complicated, gauge
invariant operators can be computed at leading order.
