Government

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 11: Government

• Respect good government and disrespect the bad.  The American Idea of Government is that we will respect our government – but only if it is truly self-government, only if it accepts its limitations, and only if it is a government of reliable laws rather than of unreliable human beings.  That’s not what we currently have.  One writer said

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century:  a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke…American culture is better than our government…Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair.[i]

We should respect political leaders when they advocate the great American Ideas, and dismiss them quickly when they don’t.  It has been observed that “people with power that they think is justified break rules…because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.  This sense of entitlement is crucial to understanding why people misbehave in high office…the sense which some powerful people seem to have that different rules apply to them is not just a convenient smoke screen.  They genuinely believe it.”[ii]

We do ourselves no favors if we respect bad government just because it’s there or because it’s ours.  Our founders not only didn’t respect Great Britain and King George – they went to war to sever all connections with them.  Neither should we respect politicians, supposedly our servants, when they make terrible decisions and lead us to horrible places.  The Idea recognizes at its core that Government is too important an idea to leave to those whose ambition is to govern according to their own desires.

We often hear that we should respect the president because he is the president and respect the office.  What does that mean?  What if the president is a bad person?  What if he or she uses the office for evil, or to protect evil?

This fuzzy notion of respect is old world, something reserved for kings and queens.  It is not an American concept.  Americans have generally respected what the person does – or doesn’t do.  They have always known that a good title can’t dress up a bad person, and that pretty is as pretty does.

• Remember that self-government begins with each of us governing ourselves.  The only master an American needs is himself or herself.  President George W. Bush said “Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.”[iii]   The big problem with looking for someone else to govern us is that we might find them.  Pulitzer-prize winning playwright David Mamet wrote,

Tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.[iv]

• Give everyone the responsibility and honor to pay for their citizenship on an equal basis.  Eliminate the notion that “fair” means the rich paying all of the taxes and the poor paying none.  Both are citizens, both have the right to vote, both have a claim on their self-government.  People need an investment in, a stake in, and a responsibility for their government.  It’s only human nature to care deeply about how government is spending my money.  But it’s also only human nature to care deeply about how much I can get from government if I don’t have to pay for it.

What self-respecting person would want to be part of something where they’re just along for the free ride?  This kind of system, where a huge percentage of the citizenry is able to milk the minority, is a formula for greed and entitlement, not for self-respect.  Why is how much the rich make, as long as it was earned honestly, anyone’s business but their own?

Not all citizens vote, which makes voting a privilege, not an unalienable right.  Children born to American parents are U.S. Citizens, but they have no “right” to vote.  They aren’t entitled to vote.

Why not?  In part because they’re dependents.  They have none of the responsibilities of citizenship – primarily paying taxes, but also serving in the military, being held accountable for criminal behavior – along with none of the privileges of citizenship, like voting.

As of this writing, 47 percent of American adults pay no federal income taxes to support the country.  Many of them, amazingly, receive money from the government.[v]  They are dependents.  They, like children, have done nothing to earn the privilege of voting.  If they have it, they are likely, like children who would vote for more candy and holidays, to vote more entitlements for themselves.

They have no stake in government, except for what they can get from it – or more precisely, from the responsible 53 percent.  They have no stake – only expectations and demands.

This is most assuredly not an argument against universal adult suffrage.  It is an argument for universal adult responsibility.

An equal percentage tax at least gets us back to some idea of equal treatment under the law.  And since it would have to be small enough for the poorest of the working poor to pay it, as a side benefit this would require government to keep itself within some very tight budgets.  Even God only asks for 10%.

• Put strict time limits on all government power.  It should have always been obvious that – given enough time – power would run amok and extend its reach into every nook and cranny of freedom.

The founders missed this entirely, in part because they couldn’t imagine why multi-faceted, talented, productive individuals would want to spend their entire lives and all of their time in an elected or appointed public office.  In fact, this kind of high-quality person generally wouldn’t want this, which is why we have so many one-dimensional, untalented, non-productive people clogging our governmental arteries.

We need to help people go away.  The problem has already been addressed by a constitutional amendment with regard to the presidency, but more is needed:

• Legislative Term Limits.  Though not as powerful as a president, a congressperson still wields a lot of power, and more and more as the government grows and grows.  12 years should be more than enough.  That would be 6 two-year terms for the House of Representatives and 2 six-year terms for the Senate.

This should be 6 house terms or 2 senate terms ever, not just consecutively.  24 years total for someone who decides to maximize their time in both houses of congress is, if anything, too much.  Self-government doesn’t need politicians who keep coming back like the flu.

Some people have said that with term limits we will lose a lot of experience.  We can be thankful for that.  Too much of this experience is learning how to campaign, raise money, develop networks, compromise, horse-trade, demand pork, and get personally rich.  If a good person can’t make a dent in 12 years, they’re probably not that good.

Why didn’t the drafters of the Constitution put these limits in?  Because no one could imagine legislators who didn’t have a life – and who wouldn’t want to get back to it.

• Judicial Term Limits.  This is the great sacred cow of unlimited, undemocratic government.  Supreme court and other justices are appointed for life.  They’re given tenure, so they don’t have to worry about arbitrary dismissal.  Unlimited tenure was originally designed to protect judges from the machinations of politics and politicians and from being fired, but instead it protects them from accountability.

12 years should be ample here as well, to give them a good run while keeping them from running over us.  If, at the same time, we don’t put some seriously needed checks in place to keep them from legislating, it should probably be much less – say 4-6 years – since much of the allure of staying around forever is the massive power that has built up in these courts over two centuries.  We have to recognize that this isn’t the same judicial system that George Washington knew.  A limit will also prevent judges from playing retirement games – hanging around until a president is elected who will appoint another one of them.

Tenure produces some of the same arrogance and stagnation in academia, but the lesser scale prevents a greater mischief.  Tenure is an insulator that, given human nature, all too often insulates against the consequences of having an extreme, even evil, position.

An interesting point here is that from 1789 to 1970, the average tenure on the Supreme Court was 15 years, not far from a 12-year limit.  Now, it is 28 years.[vi]   “Longer life spans and justices’ increasing reluctance to retire have raised their average tenure from fifteen years before 1970 to twenty-five years since then,” one observer noted in 2005.[vii]  Again, the founders couldn’t have imagined someone who would take a judicial post and not go away, or who, on average, would escape the grim reaper for so long.  12 years is enough, if not too much.  Operating decently over decades in a powerful, unaccountable position is too much to expect of any human being, no matter how decent they are starting out.

What a 12-year term limit would do in effect is simply take the current longer life spans and reluctance to let go of power out of the equation and return the actual term length to the historical average.

• Executive Term Limits.  Presidents and their cabinets aren’t the only ones who need to go.  The non-appointed, civil-service leaders of the major executive agencies also need to go away.  In this straightforward governing branch, 12 years should be enough to do good work, and not enough to cause too much trouble.  Entrenched bureaucracies have been the plague of nations for millennia.  America will not be the exception.

It’s not like the best people are even getting into office in the first place.  Alexis de Tocqueville said

When I arrived in the United States, I discovered with astonishment that good qualities were common among the governed but rare among the rulers.  In our day it is a constant fact that the most outstanding Americans are seldom summoned to public office…[viii]

• Reverse the flow of power and money, by enlarging individual and local government and shrinking state and national government.  We need to ask, about every question or issue, “How nearby can this best be decided?”  We should want the vast majority to be decided very close to home.

But the opposite is now true.  When looking at central government spending as a percentage of total government spending (a measure of centralization) only New Zealand and Britain (among developed countries) exceed the United States’ near-60 percent.

Only recently in our history have we looked first to the national government to decide.  We need to turn this around and start with ourselves, and then only slowly and reluctantly move out to the community or city, county or state, or (with great disinclination) the national government.  Having the right starting point is an American founding idea, and that starting point has always been the individual, followed by local government.

In 2009, we learned that “Federal aid is top revenue for states” for the first time in history.  Sadly, “Uncle Sam has supplanted sales, property and income taxes as the biggest source of revenue for state and local governments.”[ix]  This raises questions like:

• How does this not produce dependency on the top and control from the top?
• Since “He who has the gold makes the rules,” how can state and local government refuse any national dictates that have money (or the threat of withholding money) attached to them?
• Why is revenue going directly from individuals to the national level where a cut is taken out before the money is returned to the state and local level?
• How can we expect state and local government to be responsible with our money, since they can merrily spend tax revenues that they never had to painfully collect?
• At what point does state and local government become irrelevant?  But still costly?

At some point, perhaps not far off, the concept of a multi-tiered national/state/local government will cease being an asset, a bearer of decentralization, checks and balances, and financial restraint.  It will be a choking liability with top-down control, multiple levels of regulation, and a myriad of ways to tax the people to death.  A that point, we might as well rid ourselves of the states – power pawns of the national behemoth – and at least eliminate that level of taxation and regulation.

In a nation of 10 million people, there was no way a national government was going to be able to intelligently and fairly address individual and local needs and concerns.  In a nation of 300 or 400 million?  The formula becomes one size fits all, my way or the highway.

We need to completely abandon the preposterous notion of the national government funding state and local government.  The national government needs to leave us with as much of our own money as possible and return any overtaxing (meaning money not used for legitimate national purposes) to us as individuals.  And it needs to let state and local government generate its own tax revenues and answer to us for those taxes.  We need to cut out the national middlemen, make state and local government more accountable, and localize both solutions and the allocation of funds to those solutions.[x]

This shift of power to bigger government is reflected in wages and salaries.  Federal workers rule, with earnings that are 13 percent higher than private sector jobs and benefits which were an astounding 412 percent higher.  Out of 216 occupations that exist in both the federal and private sectors, 180 jobs paid better in the federal government.

USA Today reported in November 2010 that “the number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office….Top-paid staff have increased in every department and agency.  The Defense Department had nine civilians earning $170,000 or more in 2005, 214 when Obama took office, and 994 in June….The biggest pay hikes have gone to employees who have been with the government for 15 to 24 years.  Since 2005, average salaries for this group climbed 25% compared with a 9% inflation rate….Since 2000, federal pay and benefits have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for private workers, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.”[xi]

Even government closer to the people has gotten in on the act.  Government workers at the state and local level also often receive hefty premium over the private-sector workers who pay their wages and benefits.  “Per hour worked, state and local government workers enjoy 34% higher wages and 70% more benefits than their private-sector counterparts.”   While only 21 percent of private workers have a defined-benefit pension, for example, 84 percent of state and local workers have them. [xii]

It has been cowardly politicians who created this injustice and disaster-in-waiting.  As David Brooks noted in the New York Times,

In states across the country, the elected leaders raise state employee salaries in the fat years and then are careful to placate the unions by raising future pension benefits in the lean ones.  Even if cost-conscious leaders are elected, they find their hands tied by pension commitments and employee contracts.  The end result is sclerotic government.  Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose.  But we don’t have that government.  We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.  This situation…has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure.[xiii]

Private-sector workers now clearly exist to pay their “betters” in government “service,” a relationship that has never worked over the long haul in a free society.

• Resist the notion that government can or should expand to meet needs or solve problems.  The ends don’t justify the means.  Even very good purposes can turn ugly, when they are used as a Trojan horse to increase government power and destroy limits around that power.  What’s used for good today can be used for all sorts of bad later on.

Acclaimed historian Jacques Barzun wrote that World War II

…Had solidly established the welfare state.  Its beginnings…go back, first, to Germany in the 1880s; then to England and the budget of 1911; conclusively to the 1930s when President Roosevelt with his brain trust…set up agencies to administer a full program.  Throughout the West nowadays no other type of government is dreamed of; the only debate between opposed parties is whether the government shall be fatter or leaner and it appears that sustained dieting is something bureaucracies find as hard as individuals….The task of distributing benefits was alone overwhelming.  High taxes were unavoidable, and so was waste.  Add to it corruption, also inevitable when inspectors are afoot, and it should have been no surprise [that]…There was still poverty, derelicts on the street, unattended illness, and complaints of “not enough” from every welfare group in turn…[xiv]

Good government was thought of by the founders as performing its limited functions well, not as doing good.  Once we allow government – armed with power, guns, regulations, and taxes – to become a do-gooder, there’s nothing to prevent it from intruding into every area of life.  If it’s good for everyone to have a healthy lifestyle or take a vacation, why shouldn’t government dictate and pay for those?

An expert who evaluated the 1958-1962 government-caused famine in China that claimed 45 million lives wrote,

…As the modern world struggles to find a balance between freedom and regulation, the catastrophe unleashed at the time stands as a reminder of how profoundly misplaced is the idea of state planning as an antidote to chaos.[xv]

An editorial in USA Today said,

A government whose primary mission increasingly is to tax (and borrow from) the young to fund entitlement programs, largely for seniors, is inviting economic stagnation and endangering its future…. An economy and culture that worships consumerism rather than saving and investment is a problem as well.  So, too, is a political system that caters to influential insiders and a tax code that has become a vehicle for rewarding them.[xvi]

The former chairman and CEO of American Express wrote

Governments have an obligation to spend our tax money on programs that work.  They fail at this fundamental task.  Do we really need dozens of retraining programs with no measure of performance or results?  Do we really need to spend money on solar panels , windmills, and battery-operated cars when we have ample energy supplies in this country?  Do we really need all the regulations that put an estimated $2 trillion burden on our economy by raising the price of things we buy?  Do we really need subsidies for domestic sugar farmers and ethanol producers?  Why do we require that public projects pay above-market labor costs?  Why do we spend billions on trains that no one will ride?  Why do we keep post  offices open in places no one lives?  Why do we subsidize small airports in communities close to larger ones?  Why do we pay government workers above-market rates and outlandish benefits?  Do we really need an energy department or an education department at all?  Here’s my message:  Before you “ask” for more tax money from me and others, raise the $2.2 trillion you already collect each year more fairly and spend it more wisely.  Then you’ll need less of my money.[xvii]

Wisdom tells us to go back to the founders’ definition.  Right now, we are very far from wisdom.  President Ronald Reagan said, “We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women, by sending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated Federal Establishment.”[xviii]

• Pass a constitutional amendment stating clearly what the federal government can’t do.  Far too much has been read into the spaces in the Constitution.  The General Welfare and Commerce clauses have alone been sufficient generalities to allow massive expansion of government power and political careers.  Jefferson said “In matters of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”[xix]

We need an expanded 10th Amendment, the last one of the Bill of Rights.  It’s the one that supposedly prevented the national government from doing anything not specifically called out in the Constitution.  But this everything-else-is-prohibited approach was too general and has proven to be remarkably ineffective.  In fact, a huge percentage of congressional, executive and judicial acts are in direct violation of the Constitution (in its 10th Amendment) that they swore to obey and uphold.

We’ve got to get over the notion that government is better in either morals or effectiveness than we are as individual Americans.  We can be sure that

the fact that markets are prone to sometimes spectacular failure does not mean that governments are immune to it…Policy-makers will not be able to give a serious answer to [the] question of whether “government works” without first asking themselves some more fundamental questions about what the state should be doing and what it should be leaving well alone.[xx]

We need an amendment that uses precise language to lock the national government out of areas like education, employment, housing and health care, and that specifically eliminates the government’s ability to create new rights like privacy.  Some might argue that it would be difficult to put together such a list – but this isn’t nearly as difficult as living without it has become.

We could start with and use all of the language of the 10th Amendment, concluding with, “to make this amendment effective, the national government will not…”

• Fix constitutional defect 1, The Warrior President, with strict limits.  We need to make starting wars very hard to do (we cover this in detail in Chapter 13, The American Idea of Peace).  But whatever we do with war in general, we certainly need to take this violent course of action out of the hands of a single person.

This is the most terrible and destructive decision a nation can ever make.  Sometimes it’s unavoidable.  Those are the only times that this decision should be made.

All of this is especially dangerous when fear is inflamed and security becomes the main concern, as it has today.  Alexis de Tocqueville said

I readily admit that public tranquility is a great good, but at the same time I cannot forget that all nations have been enslaved by being kept in good order…A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart, the slave of its own well-being, awaiting only the bond that will bind it.[xxi]

Presidents as commanders-in-chief might be a good idea.  But this can right now morph into a number of harmful notions.  We can have presidents who

• Play tough guy.  The president as unofficial starter or declarer of wars is always a bad plan.  When a secretary of defense can claim that he doesn’t know if blowing up people and buildings constitutes a war, we’re in sorry shape.  Three times in the 20th century the United States elected presidents who ran on a peace platform: Wilson (“he kept us out of war”) in 1916, Roosevelt (who signed a neutrality act while working to arm and support one side) in 1940, and Johnson (“I will not send our boys to Vietnam”[xxii]) in 1964.  All three led us into war the next year.  It is the way to a powerful and memorable presidency – and to the death of thousands, and to the squandering of wealth and resources, and ultimately to the loss of liberty.

• Play favorites.  No president should be allowed to aid one side while claiming neutrality or even-handedness as Woodrow Wilson did with the Allies in World War I and Franklin Roosevelt did with Great Britain (using lend lease) in World War II.

• Play general.  No president should take over actual military operations, as Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam.  What is more ridiculous than someone with zero military experience in strategy and tactics making decisions about military strategy and tactics?

• Play cop.  The notion of a police action, like the undeclared wars of Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, has already drained America of too much blood and treasure.  Unless we’re attacked – and by a nation, not by isolated terrorists – no military action should be permitted without a formal declaration of war and a thirty-day waiting period, so that democracy has a chance to work.    There’s no limit to the number of international things that need fixing.  There may be an axis of evil out there, but there’s plenty of evil for us to worry about here at home.  Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”[xxiii]

• Play patriot.  We don’t need presidents claiming that we have to keep going in a military adventure because we’re already committed and need to support the troops (reminding us of Dr. Johnson’s comment that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”[xxiv]).  There is true patriotism, but using it to cover up violence and undeclared wars isn’t it.

There are several things we can do:

• Always require a formal, written declaration of war.  It should be signed first by all members of Congress voting in the affirmative and then by the President.  There’s something about putting your signature to a document that sobers the soul.

• Define what victory looks like.  How will we know if we’ve won?  What’s the overall objective?  Things that involve the deaths of so many should at least be required to have an overarching meaning that Americans can understand and accept.  This needs to be stated in the declaration of war.

• Put a strictly defined scope in place.  Nothing is more common in war (or almost anything else) than scope creep.  A war starts as “eliminate a dictator” and ends up as “build a nation from scratch.”  This definition of scope can’t be done on the fly – things move too fast and there’s too much on-the-spot decision-making going on.  This too needs to be stated in the declaration of war.  Presidents and generals will claim that this will tie their hands.  Exactly.

• Have direct election of the vice president.  The vice president, we’re told, is a heartbeat away from the presidency.  In a sense, he or she is a president-in-waiting and thus commander-in-chief-in-waiting.  We have no say in who this is, not one of us.  Right now we give potentially the most important office in the land to someone based on the fancy of one powerful person during the lunacy of a nominating convention – and often as almost an afterthought.  Lyndon Johnson was rejected as a nominee and only became president after an assassination.  We want the vice president to know he or she is there because of us, not solely because of the president.  The president could nominate two or three candidates for the people’s vote, but we should get the final say.   This will serve to make the vice president more of an independent check on the president as well, especially in this terrible area of war.

• Move toward a non-royal, non-grasping executive branch.  Famed Senator Daniel Webster noted that “The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.”[xxv]

For some people, there’s nothing like getting to call the shots.  Enough power and celebrity have now been accumulated in the presidency that he or she, it seems, often gets to call all of the shots.  No wonder people of ambition – and often little else – want this so badly, even with all of the stresses and criticism and (often) drop in income.

In one sense, the only way to eliminate this threat to freedom is to get society back to the American Ideas and to get government back into its assigned sphere.  When presidents are able to get involved in issues like early childhood education, unhealthy lifestyles, how many lights we can turn on and automobile warranties, we’ve got something that is both unlimited in scope and ridiculous in design.

Presidents have amassed great power to bend events and people to their will.  This can never be advantageous to freedom, and could only work well over time if presidents were omniscient and flawless in their execution.  Amity Shlaes, an expert on the Great Depression, said

As it turned out, F.D.R.’s tenacity did not suffice to get the economy back to where it had been before the Great Depression began, in 1929.  Today we know that actions Roosevelt took to resolve the crisis may actually have perpetuated it.  Especially during the period from 1935 to about 1939, Roosevelt’s moves kept recovery at bay…In his 1937 Inaugural Address, F.D.R. told the nation outright that government was now fashioning itself into an “instrument of unimagined power.”[xxvi]

Frightening.  Too much power in anyone’s hands is a formula for national disaster.

This is all magnified when presidents have no prior executive experience, or no knowledge of the areas they are commanding, or both.  Not even a small company would install someone as president who had never run anything before.  They would rightly recognize this as a formula for failure.  The formula holds, only with much bigger numbers, when we install someone like this as president of the nation.

And there’s a huge difference between the skills it takes to run for office and the skills it takes to govern, roughly equivalent to the difference between interviewing for a job well and actually doing the job well.  We might get lucky, but we can’t count on it.  We can be helped here by shortening campaigns and publically financing both parties with the same dollars.  We can then dispose of the remarkably stupid notion that we know they can run things, because look at how they’re running their huge campaign, a false idea akin to “I’ve raised puppies well, so I should be a good parent.”

In short, we seldom face the most logical explanation for the lack of leadership and leadership qualities we see permeating the executive branch:  the possibility that these people might not be leaders.  They might just be the survivors of a great political game.

The rest of the executive branch – the hundreds of thousands of people who, in theory, work for the president – are an out-of-control rulemaking force of their own.  Even under a “conservative” president like George W. Bush, they “added an average of 1,000 pages of federal regulations each year he was in office.  America now has a quarter of a million people devising and implementing federal rules.”[xxvii]

There are only one or two solutions:  Either fewer federal bureaucrats or more restrictions on what they can do to us.  Both could be…life-saving.

The president isn’t in charge of the Constitution, the government, the military, the nation, or the culture.  We are in charge.  We the people.  That’s the American Idea.

• Fix constitutional defect 2, The Profligate Congress, with strict limits.   Congress will never, ever, restrain itself.  The history of the last half century is all the proof that is needed.  So we need to help them.  We should

• Require the government to live within strict financial boundaries.  Why should government be the only sphere of life where financial rules and math don’t apply?  They get to tax, borrow, and print money, all of which can lead a nation to ruin, all of which are leading us to ruin right now.  We need unbendable limits of various kinds – for example:

• Total taxation limited to a percentage of GDP but with a fixed upper dollar limit
• Borrowing and total debt limited to a multiple of annual tax revenue (so, for example, with $2.5 trillion in revenue and a 4x multiplier, total debt could not exceed $10 trillion)
• Money supply limited to a percentage of GDP

When growth is at a certain level, surpluses should be set aside, and then used to offset deficits when growth falls below another certain level.

These strict financial boundaries must apply to the so-called entitlement programs as well.  An editorial in the Wall Street Journal, talking about Texas governor Rick Perry, noted

He’s even technically right that Social Security is a species of Ponzi scheme (if not a criminal enterprise) in the sense that young people today are putting more into the system than they can possibly get out in retirement.[xxviii]

• Have a no-debt-for-long ammendment rather than a balanced-budget amendment.  Debt is sometimes necessary, but should never be welcome or accepted.  A writer in the Wall Street Journal wrote in early 2011 that

The interest burden gets worse – much worse – as time goes on and spending grows, not so much in the programs that are now being discussed as on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.  Without a change, in 10 years the federal government’s net interest bill will rise to $928 billion annually.  That would be 17% more than the government would pay to provide health care to the elderly through Medicare that year and 82% more than the cost of all non-security discretionary spending programs put together…. By 2030, the U.S. could be transferring 7% of its entire economic output, or $2.5 trillion, to foreigners every year to service its debt.  The really sinister part of America’s interest bill is that it gets worse the longer Washington waits to act on the budget deficit.  The math and the logic are simple and unavoidable.  Big deficits require taking on more debt, which in turn adds to the interest payments required to service that debt.  In short, it’s a Ponzi scheme.[xxix]

Over time – not much time – the government should be required to live completely within our means.  For example, every 4th year of a president’s term, he or she should be required to submit a budget that cancels out any debt incurred in the previous 3 years.

No government ever spent money accidentally.  If it knew a financial reckoning was coming, it would be a lot more restrained in the first 3 years.

• Eliminate the influences of the monied interests and their ability to own the congress.  As founder James Madison wrote

A government operating by corrupt influence; substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty; converting its pecuniary dispensations into bounties to favorites, or bribes to opponents; accommodating its measures to the avidity of part of the nation instead of the benefit of the whole: in a word, enlisting an army of interested partizans, whose tongues, whose pens, whose intrigues, and whose active combinations, but supplying the terror of the sword, may support a real denomination of the few, under an apparent liberty of the many.  Such a government, wherever to be found, is an imposter.  It is happy for the new world that it is not on the west side of the Atlantic.  It will be both happy and honorable for the United States, if they never descend to mimic the costly pageantry of its form, nor betray themselves into the venal spirit of its administration.[xxx]

We have descended and betrayed ourselves.  But we can change all that.

• Implement a line-item veto.  Much has been written on this.  Many governors routinely exercise this potent defense against greed, waste, and bloating government.  The current system is perfectly designed to get even good bills loaded with bad ideas.

• Get the national government out of the landowning business and use the proceeds to reduce the national debt.  As America expanded westward, the national government took ownership of a vast portion of the western lands.  It has used this to expand its power greatly.  Historian Paul Johnson has noted that

The whole question of Western lands inevitably tended to strengthen the power of the federal government…because it gave it direct authority over a huge spread of territory as big as the existing states – much bigger as it turned out – which it could rule like an imperial power, and support by selling off bits to settlers.  That…made it inevitable that the federal center would strengthen itself as time went by.[xxxi]

The national government owns a huge percentage of the U.S. landmass.  It should be removed from this business, by selling off everything other than national parks, or by ceding that land to the states.  Any and all proceeds should go directly toward reducing or eliminating the national debt.

Reasonable restrictions can be put on development and use, including mandating that some of this be made into private parks or preserves.  But mortgaging the future – and perhaps going broke – while sitting on millions of acres of land is a foolish way to run a nation.

• Move toward the non-permanent, citizen congress. In the congress, we have allowed the development and entrenchment of a self-aggrandizing political aristocracy.

The legislative branch is supposed to be the first and foremost instrument of democracy, the voice of the people, and a forum for ensuring that liberty isn’t trampled.  But this political oligarchy has the power, connections and money to make legitimate attempts to unseat them almost futile.  The concept of the citizen representative is dead, but desperately in need of resurrection.

Founder Tom Paine said that legislators are “supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have who appointed them.”[xxxii]  Our “concerns at stake” are preserving our lives, making a living, being able to keep what we’ve worked for, and deciding for ourselves how we will spend our time and money.  Their “concerns at stake” are all too often getting elected over and over again, amassing power, and expressing their concern for us in a way that will get us to elect them.

Limits, we’re told, would cause us to lose “experience.”  But what if that experience is bad?  The average citizen knows, for example, that you can’t forever spend more than you bring in, while our “experienced” legislators have long forgotten that simple truth of life.  Experience is the last refuge of a scalawag politician.

How do we get back to the citizen congress?  We need a mindset of “no career politicians,” along with term limits, public financing of campaigns, campaign-duration limits, and a re-evaluation of the attorney-as-prince if we want the useful turmoil of liberty and democracy to remain alive.

If citizen soldiers are good enough to fight and win our biggest wars, citizen legislators should be good enough to prevent them.  Right now we have the best legislators that money can buy – which is not necessarily the same thing as the best legislators.

And we have them…forever.

• Redefine the role of the legislative branch as being representatives rather than lawmakers.  Americans need a lot more representation and a lot less lawmaking.  When we have 535 people at the federal level dedicated to lawmaking, there is one certain casualty – freedom.  James Madison wrote

The facility and excess of law-making seem to be the diseases to which our governments are most liable.[xxxiii]

In a recent year (2009), a total of 8,696 bills were introduced in Congress (3,259 in the Senate and 5,437 in the House).[xxxiv]  To say this is ridiculous is to defame the word ridiculous.  The fact that “only” 112 were signed into law is cold comfort. .  At that rate, in 10 years we would have 1,120 new laws.  No free people can remain free if they’re being imposed upon at even a fraction of that rate.

A related problem is that government is now involved in so many things that our “lawmakers” don’t even know what laws they are making.  “Aides, at the elbows of senators as they shuttle between their offices and the Capitol, have proliferated over the past few decades, and they play a crucial role.  Lamar Alexander, who has an office of fifty people, pointed out that staff members, who are younger and often more ideological than their bosses, and less dependent on institutional relationships, tend to push senators toward extremes.  Often, aides are the main actors behind proposed legislation – writing bills, negotiating the details – while the senator is relegated to repeating talking points…”[xxxv]  The congress is now far removed from the American Idea of Government.  They are relying on people who are guaranteed to remove the Idea out of sight.  Thomas Jefferson observed that

The instability of our laws is really an immense evil.  I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelve-month between engrossing a bill and passing it; that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word; and that if circumstances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both Houses instead of a bare majority.[xxxvi]

A representative would actually be concerned with representing our interests.  Americans should be at least as interested in eliminating unnecessary or badly formed laws as they are in creating new laws – and if they are committed to freedom, perhaps more interested.

But a true representative could go a lot further than just restraining the lawmaking addiction and knocking down laws left and right.  They could spend their energies and talents putting strict boundaries around the massive, proliferating agencies in the executive branch.  These are little lawmaking empires of their own, who in addition to their ability to execute their own laws have the ability to sit in judgment on them as well.  Only a brief look at the size of the Federal Register, the home base of national rules, would make even the heartiest of Americans question the phrase “the land of the free.”

We need to applaud senators and representatives who focus on defending freedom by eliminating laws and rules – some before they’re passed, some after they’ve been signed, and some that are being generated daily by a little government army of rulemaking bureaucrats and petty tyrants.

• Put tight boundaries around politicians’ ability to make promises for after they are gone.  Politicians, especially career politicians, love praise and votes while they hate conflict and responsibility.  What fits better into that mindset than making big promises to current constituents that don’t have to be paid for until A.R.O.L. (After Retirement on to Lobbying)?

At the federal level, how many of those who voted for Social Security in the 1930s were still in office the first time it had to be saved in the 1970s?  How many who voted for Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s are still around for the financial disaster they passed on to us?  How about those who voted for expanding benefits under these programs, making them far more voracious than the original sponsors even imagined?

At the state and local level, how many who cave into huge and early pensions for public-sector employees will be there to make good on the funding?  “Politicians love to bestow goodies on their constituents, especially retirement benefits for public-sector workers – largesse that some future sucker ultimately has to pay for.  Decades of this kind of behavior have left a lot of states with growing structural deficits….benefits that the governments have promised workers without setting aside the money to pay for them.”[xxxvii]

If a public or private company did this, its officers would go to jail.  Why don’t politicians who do this – on a much larger scale – go to jail?

The only solution is for all legislation on future entitlements, pensions or other political promises to contain absolute limits that cannot be violated without further legislation.  Limits could be on the number of people to be covered, amount to be spent on each person, or total amount that can ever be spent on the program in a fiscal year.  Having all 3 limits would be even more effective.

• Have public, limited financing of political campaigns.  The trend is clear:  No rules can or will limit the amount of money a politician raises, or how many obligations will go along with all of those donations.  We’ve even seen those who pledge to use public funding abandon their promise when they uncover some new way to raise mounds of cash.

In addition to corrupting and distorting the process, money makes campaigns perpetual and bloated.  It provides the means to create vast smear advertising.  And it creates countless IOUs from the politician to his or her supporters, few of those IOUs representing a benefit to society.

People used to say, “Anyone can grow up to be president.”  But everyone can’t grow up to be president anymore.  Only the rich and well-connected can.  Good government requires smart, talented, committed people with good ideas, but many of them may have little money, or little desire to do the nasty work of raising a war chest.

Much that’s wrong with government can be eliminated if we take money out of the equation.  All the way out.

• Have limits on the amount of time a campaign can run in the public arena.  Perpetual campaigns mean minimal governing.

This is so in part because of the time and energy spent on campaigning, but also because every decision or action is one that affects the campaign.  There is no way to prevent candidates from preparing campaigns behind the scenes, but it would be very obvious if they publically violated a campaign start date.

Allowing a 6-month campaign would allow for all of the issues to get a full hearing – probably still too much – without pummeling Americans without a break.  Having 18 months between an election and the next campaign would be a gift every American would be grateful to receive.

• Fix constitutional defect 3, The Unchecked Judiciary, with strict limits and needed additions.   The Constitution is an incredible document, but it didn’t go far enough in its main purpose – which was to limit the power of the government itself.  Nowhere is this deficiency more apparent than in the case of the judiciary.  Thomas Jefferson said that

The constitution…is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please….The Judiciary of the U.S. is the subtle corps of sappers & miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric….Having found from experience that impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scarecrow, they consider themselves secure for life; they skulk from responsibility to public opinion…[xxxviii]

The Supreme Court gives itself the role of interpreting – subjectively – what the Constitution means and whether another part of the government (including state and local government) is following the law.  What began as an interpretation of what was written has become an interpretation of what wasn’t written, until the document can be made to mean anything and ends up meaning nothing.

Delegate to the Continental Congress Melancton Smith noted that the court is

so framed as to clinch all the other powers, and to extend them in a silent and imperceptible manner to any thing and everything, while the court who are vested with these powers are totally independent, uncontrollable and not amenable to any other power in any decisions they may make.[xxxix]

Not just the court – each judge is totally independent.  Justice Potter Stewart confirmed this:  “Unlike any institution in the world, there is no boss of the court…Nobody can tell another Justice what to do and what not to do.”[xl]  Earlier, Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote without shame that justices must “pronounce judgment…according to the rules which he would establish if he were to assume the part of a legislator.”[xli]  Alexis de Tocqueville observed

In the United States the lawyers constitute a power which is little dreaded and hardly noticed; it has no banner of its own; it adapts itself flexibly to the exigencies of the moment and lets itself be carried along unresistingly by every movement of the body social; but it enwraps the whole of society, penetrating each component class and constantly working in secret upon its unconscious patient, till in the end it has molded it to its desire.[xlii]

Judicial law-making, beyond our reach and often beyond our understanding, moves us ever so subtly but relentlessly toward a judicial monarchy.  They’ll say that they aren’t monarchs, that they’re merely attempting to defend the rights of the people (Rousseau’s notion used so effectively by so many autocrats).  But calling themselves freedom fighters will not change their actual roles or remove their monarchical robes.

People of all stripes have become enamored with the ease with which the power of a very tiny group can turn the entire government.  James MacGregor Burns wrote that, under the Warren court, “many liberals not only forgot their past objections to judicial power, but were seduced into the belief that the court, not the political branches…was the best constitutional vehicle to extend and protect progressive gains into the future.”[xliii]   Having 5 people take your side is a lot easier than democracy.

The lack of limitation here has exposed liberty to incredible risk.  Changes are needed, and fast.  These include:

• Creation of a judicial check prohibiting judges and courts from breaking or making law.  Too many judges and academics believe that the Constitution should be considered a living document, by which they mean “We get to have opinions about what the law should mean in our current situation, and then read those opinions into the Constitution.”

The Supreme Court regularly makes and cancels laws.  This has become the court’s main stock-in-trade.  We need specific limits around what this undemocratic, unelected branch can – and can’t – do.  We need to convince them that they aren’t lawmakers.  And we need to keep them out of the executive function entirely.

After more than two centuries of judges relentlessly expanding their power, we at long last need to modify the Constitution to correct this glaring deficiency of the founding fathers.  We need an amendment that prohibits the supreme court and other federal courts from voiding laws passed by congress, or from making up their own laws in lieu of congress.

If we want the amendment to provide a judicial check on the Congress, we can have the amendment require a unanimous vote of the court to void a law, as proposed long ago by Senator George Norris (one of eight senators profiled in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage).  He observed that it takes a unanimous vote of a jury to convict someone of murder, so “I don’t see why it should not take a unanimous court to find a law unconstitutional.”

For liberty to be secure, courts have to be limited to their proper sphere – to judge individual cases in light of law passed by someone else, and not to become (as they virtually have) the whole government.

Everything that a constitution means to say should be said, clearly and restrictively.  It should contain all of its intentions, and leave as little room for interpretation as possible.  But if there is an interpretation, it should come as an amendment from the people, the ones who gave it life.  It shouldn’t come from a branch of the very government that is defined by the constitution.

The Constitution is a living document, speaking wisdom for centuries, without any help from these judges.  It needs to be amended carefully, transparently and only to make limits more solid.  All judicial decisions that try to break new (meaning unconstitutional) ground should automatically come up for review by Congress, which can, with a majority vote, override the court’s decision.

The alternative has turned out to be a poor one.  One or two judges can direct the entire government and society.  As Franklin Roosevelt’s Assistant Attorney General noted, “when the decision of crucial constitutional issues” depended on “a single death, or resignation, or change of mind,” the freedom of a free people is in serious jeopardy.  He thought in this case “that our constitutional progress is governed by a blind fate instead of by human reason.”[xliv]

• The addition of a legislative check on the judiciary’s judgments.  As founder Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist #81,

The authority of the proposed supreme court of the United States, which is to be a separate and independent body, will be superior to that of the legislature.  The power of construing the laws, according to the spirit of the constitution, will enable that court to mould them into whatever shape it may think proper; especially as its decisions will not be in any manner subject to the revision or correction of the legislative body.  This is as unprecedented as it is dangerous.[xlv]

• We need a way for the people to be the Supreme Court.  The loop has to be closed in the world of checks and balances.  The people must have a way to override the aristocratic courts.  A 2/3 vote in both houses of congress should be sufficient to prevent us from rushing too quickly to override bad law, but not too high to cause us to live with bad law until enough judges die.

• Expansion of the candidate list – Why should only lawyers become judges?  Like all professionals, they’re trained to think in a certain way.  They don’t have expertise in most of the topics upon which they’re asked to render an opinion or judgment.  They can even disqualify expert witnesses who know a lot more about the topic than the one controlling the process.

The alternatives?  We could have people with specific expertise (for example, in areas of finance, mergers & acquisitions, family life, etc.) who are then trained in the law that applies to their area of expertise.  We could have judges with specific expertise who are advised by legal experts.  Or we could have judicial panels, with, say, 2 of the judges having specific expertise and the 3rd providing the legal perspective.

This would relieve attorneys of great pressure, since it’s such a terrible burden to have to know…everything.

• A lower threshold for judicial removal – As Thomas Jefferson noted, the super-majority votes required in Congress to remove a judge make this impossible in practice.  A simple majority should be quite sufficient to remove a judge who is operating under delusions of grandeur, overriding the people, or making law from the bench.  Think what this would do to make the judiciary accountable to the people – the only legitimate source of power in any nation, but particularly in a democratic republic.

Some might argue that this could cause chaos in the judiciary.  In the first place, removal wouldn’t be done lightly – no one is going to vote to remove a judge if the evidence isn’t plain, even overwhelming.  The chaos of wondering what the people and their representatives will think of a bizarre decree could inject a lot of reality and energy into the “hallowed halls” of these courts.  And to paraphrase Jefferson, a little revolution in these courts now and then could be very effective in a dynamic society like America’s.

• Nation-wide consistency in federal judges’ decisions – Given the law in question and the pertinent facts, it simply can’t be “Equal Justice under Law” (the motto over the entrance to the Supreme Court building) when different plaintiffs and defendants receive different – even radically different – decisions depending on the venue.

Federal decisions should be essentially the same wherever they’re rendered.  In criminal actions, people shouldn’t be given a long sentence in a tougher part of the country and probation in another.  And we shouldn’t let this be a matter of appeals, so whoever has the better lawyer gets the better justice.

Judicial discretion is often lifted up as a good thing, but it’s only as good as the judges are good – and wise, knowledgeable, experienced, unbiased, just, fair, and appropriately merciful.  Judges like this could be trusted with a lot of leeway.  Since we don’t have any of those, judicial discretion should be kept to a minimum.

The founders weren’t stupid when they forgot to put limits on the judiciary.  They just had no reference point.  They had seen unlimited executives (kings) and legislators (parliaments), but had never seen an unlimited judicial branch.

Now we have.  We need to correct what they couldn’t see.

• Move toward a non-tenured, non-regal judiciary.  Judges are in office so long, and have so much unchallenged power, that they’ve taken over an unbelievable portion of the legislative function.

Even our language betrays this ugly reality of judicial lawmaking.  People say that a Supreme Court decision is the law of the land.  How can that be?  The intention of the founders, and the clear concept in the Constitution, is that only the legislative branch can legislate – make new law, produce the law of the land.

And yet a former governor of New York can say without hesitation, “Our country is built on the principle that the ultimate authority is the court.”[xlvi]  This would have been news to the founders.  They thought that the people were the ultimate authority.

But this governor is in long-term bad company.  Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes pronounced in 1930 that “the Constitution is what the judges say it is”[xlvii] – a stunning declaration.  It would have been considered madness, if not treason, to the founders.

The truth is that there are no real checks and balances on the judicial branch.  Judges are like a driver’s-education instructor, who let the congress and president drive until they think those elected fools have made a mistake.  Then they hit the brakes or take over the steering.

We went from having a separate to an independent judicial branch.  They’re supposed to judge cases in light of the law.  Instead they can make law, by construing the Constitution any way they please, or by ignoring it altogether.  They can execute law, by commanding other branches and the states to follow their orders, as they have done for example in running local school districts.  And they can judge the law itself – including making judgments about earlier judgments of the same court.

One observer noted that “It takes two-thirds of Congress, the President’s signature and three-fourths of the states to change the Constitution – or one judge.”[xlviii]

What do we need to do?  Here are a few ways by which we can recover our democracy and preserve our freedom:

• A change in mindset.  We’ve got to get over this fawning at the feet of judges as though they are gods destined to wisely and forever rule over us.

We of course need respect for the law.  But that shouldn’t automatically transfer to a respect for the people who happen to occupy certain positions.  Some judges are worthy of respect.  Some are rogues and charlatans.  Not a few are madmen and lunatics.  Given the same facts, they can come to completely different conclusions, which themselves are sometimes insane.

And these high-ranking judges haven’t been that good.  The so-called Supreme Court has a long and sordid history.  For example, we can talk about it taking the lead in racial equality with its decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education in 1954.  But where was it for the preceding 165 years?  Enforcing slavery, enforcing segregation, and in an earlier landmark decision, voting by a 7-2 majority that black people weren’t people – not even the three-fifths of a person that a less-than-perfect Constitution allowed.  In 1954, the court wasn’t heroic.  It was merely undoing its own miserable history.

How could this court-supported racial travesty have happened?  When those in power have for too long a time been out of the reach of actual human beings, they can come to extraordinary – and extraordinarily bad – conclusions.  Very late in slavery’s tenure (in 1857), with the acceptability of slavery very much a minority notion in the country at large, the supreme court voted by a huge majority to keep it alive as they declared slaves to be property not people.

In 1973, with almost all elected state governments believing that restraints on abortion were a good thing, the Supreme Court voted by the same huge majority, 7-2, to declare living, unborn human beings to be disposable by their “owners,” to be property not people.  116 years after the Dred Scott decision, 7 people out of all Americans were still able to search the Constitution and discover a “right” to…wipe an entire group off of the humanity list.

The court intervenes to protect the “rights” of monstrous, brutal seventeen-year-olds (“children”) who have slaughtered helpless people in cold blood, while continually supporting the unlimited slaughter of pre-born children.  We don’t have to take a specific position on the question of abortion to take a very specific position on the power of judges to cast down the countless laws of widely diverse state legislatures and their approving governors.

There is no right to slavery, either in the Constitution or in the moral realm.  And likewise there is no right to privacy – especially heinous when that “right” is promoted at the total expense of another American citizen.

The court may someday overturn its unconstitutional, undemocratic, unrepresentative, heavy-handed support for abortion as it did for slavery.  But it won’t be heroic.  It will only be correcting its own errors.

• The creation of a judicial check and balance on terms.  The constitutional process check – the passing of a constitutional amendment – is too big to be used except in the rarest and most crucial of circumstances.  Judicial term limits is one of the most important items on our action list if we want to preserve the American Idea of Government.

Just as the founders sought to guard the judiciary against political manipulation by allowing them to be appointed for life, so we must guard ourselves and our political institutions against the judiciary by placing them under a term limit.  We do indeed want to keep judges out of the reach of those in the other branches of government and out of the reach of political manipulation.  But we don’t want to keep them out of our reach.

The way they stay in office until they are literally dying is one of the great clues that the power and prestige have become too much for them to give up.  They don’t have anything to return to or go on to that would give them this kind of dominance over all other Americans, this kind of power buzz.  They become out of touch, not only because of their age and often declining faculties, but also because of their decades of insulation from society and…us.

• A new title.  We have a Supreme (a bad word in a free society) Court.  It is a part of government, but it is the least accessible to the people.  It’s a group with access to great power and unchecked authority, and in this awful way it is supreme.  It has duties, but incredibly, it has no responsibility to the people.

When men and women in an elite professional club and wearing regal clothing are also told that they’re part of a Supreme Court, the chance for mischief begins a geometric expansion.

Surely in a democracy we can come up with a better prefix in court titles than “supreme” – perhaps something like “court of last resort?”  Words aren’t everything, but they aren’t nothing either.  Supreme is defined as “highest in rank or authority; paramount; sovereign; chief.”[xlix]  But the highest in rank or authority in a free society, the only group that is paramount, sovereign and chief, is the people.

• Elimination of all of the trappings of royalty.  This isn’t a monarchy.  Eliminate the “all stand” when a judge enters the room.  Americans don’t bow to royalty, or stand for it either (in either sense).  Eliminate the “your honor” business as well.  Why should they be considered any more honorable than the good citizens who stand before them?

This also isn’t a church choir.  What’s the story with those robes?  If people in congress wore them, we’d fall down laughing.  If the president wore one, we’d start thinking about the qualifications of the vice president to take his or her place.  In a freewheeling, tumultuous democracy, we neither need nor want pretensions to grandeur.

The robes, to be sure, are just a symbol.  But a symbol of what?  Symbols are not unimportant.  They stand for something.  To say it another way, if they were just a symbol they would have already been abolished in our less-formal age.  No, these robes stand for something.  What is it?

• First, these kinds of things are barriers of distinction.  They’re designed to separate the wearers from the rest of us mere citizens.  They put on the robes – as monarchs have done in ages past – to show us that they’re special, distant, and above us.
• Second, they’re invitations to pride and arrogance.  They say that the wearers are our wise protectors, our guardians, our divines.
• Third, they have a religious significance.  They enter their chambers, change their appearance, put on their holy garments, and speak ex cathedra (from the chair) like the Pope.  Our rising when they enter their holy places is but one indication of a very religious and very, very undemocratic scenario.

Arguments that this is all designed to show respect for the law fall flat.  If we need all of this pomp to tell us that we should respect the rule of law and human and civil rights, we’re already in serious trouble.  The reality is that this pomp and regal treatment actually help lead to disrespect for the rule of law and our rights – by the judges.

James MacGregor Burns observed how the Court’s trinkets – “the marble temple, the high bench, the purple curtain, the black robes” – set the Court above us all.  But he went on to say that “Americans cannot look to the judicial branch for leadership.  They cannot expect leadership from unelected and unaccountable politicians in robes.”[l]

These judges are elevated above us, above the milieu of social and cultural life, and above our reach – and they know it.  Given human nature, it would be hard to conceive how this would not lead them to a conclusion that they’re also above the law – over it, outside of it, and sitting in judgment on it.  Which is exactly where they are right now.

We need justice, and we need judges to help us get it.  But we don’t need a tiny, elite, insulated, supremacist group of lawyers to tell free people how to live.

• Expect government to give us honest, consistent, understandable information.  How can citizens think about issues clearly and vote intelligently when they don’t have useful information?

Taking just one example, the CPI (Consumer Price Index):  “…the Consumer Price Index understates the actual cost of living for most people…The inflation rate was 1.5% [in 2010] – but gas prices rose by 13.8%…household goods by 6.7%…water and sewer costs, 5.7%…and meat and poultry 5.5%.” [li]

In other words, the official measure of inflation doesn’t account for the main things that people have to buy.  So we’re led to believe that inflation is only 1.5% when it is much higher for actual human beings.

Government can manipulate policy and decisions in part because it is constantly manipulating the data.  We’re Americans.  We can handle the truth.  We insist on it.

There’s a tremendous amount for us to do to re-birth the American Idea of Government.  But we can do it.  We have to honor the work done by the founders while clearly facing its deficiencies.  They themselves expected us to do it:

• “The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter the constitutions of government.” (George Washington)
• “Each generation…has a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness.” (Thomas Jefferson)
• “Whenever [the people] shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” (Abraham Lincoln)

What a grand gift.