Will big government be felled by big government overreach, arrogance and overconfidence?

One of my favorite shows is a program called “Person of Interest’ on CBS. The story revolves around a government computer that knows when someone somewhere is in danger and passes that information along to a team of ex government types who go on to save that particular Person of Interest. The show’s device is that the machine can tap into virtually every piece of electronic data on the planet and harness the video feed from every surveillance camera in the world.

While the heroes saving the day makes for a feel good show, it’s never a cakewalk. Besides the bad guys targeting each week’s Person of Interest, the good guys have to deal with the ongoing threat from a cabal of dirty cops as well as the machinations of the government agency that used to control the machine.

It all makes for great entertainment, because the good guys always win and all the scariness is limited to sixty minutes on the small screen. In the real world such government stories are rarely that entertaining. What makes them lack entertainment value in the real world is that the good guys don’t always win and there’s that small issue of who gets to decide who are the good guys in the first place.

Although Person of Interest is fiction, the idea of a Machiavellian government that seeks to manipulate events, extinguish opposition and deceive its citizenry certainly isn’t. In real life we are seeing just such a government emerge right in front of us. Not that it hasn’t been there for years, because it has, but up until now it was largely cloaked from sight for those depending on the fourth estate to tell them what to see.

Now the onion is beginning to peel. Today Washington is overwhelmed with scandals of the Obama administration seeking to use bully pulpit and the police power of government to effect its political ends. From the constantly shifting talking points of the Benghazi story to the Justice Department seizing AP records, to the EPA head seeking to hide her correspondence to the IRS muzzling groups opposing President Obama, it seems like every day brings a new story of deceitfulness and manipulation.

It is very important that the next conservative Republican presidential candidates face up to the idea that the office of the presidency has become too powerful, and needs to be reigned in.

This really goes against the grain, of course. Because all candidates tell themselves that *they* would use such huge power wisely. But that is not the point. The point is that the government has become imbalanced, and needs to be fixed.

And it needs to start by fixing the office of the president.

And it also needs the cooperation of congress and the SCOTUS, so that once the office of the POTUS has been fixed, they stand in the way of it being broken again.

There is quite a list of what should be done, and why.

End the presidential signing statements, prohibit Czars, codify presidential memorandum so that to survive a presidency they must be approved by congress. End presidential proclamation land grabs and create a process to return taken state lands to the states.

Restore the War Powers Act and the Posse Comitatus Act. Declare that *all* international agreements, and *any* modifications to existing agreements, must be approved by the senate. That there are no agreements, binding or otherwise, that exist outside this process.

Codify executive privilege to list all applications and all exclusions. Remake the State of the Union into a written submission to save the government time and money. Mandate that all cabinet officers must appear before their senate and house committees twice a year, in either or both open and closed session as the committees requires; with a follow up appearance to answer any unavailable questions.

You know, it is too bad the Founders had not had to vision and knowledge of how abusive a government always becomes when it becomes large.

Oh, wait, WTF, they did and gave us a government with strict limits on its scope and the ultimate stop gap tool should all else fail, known as the 2nd Amendment.

IMO, we are at the point where only the stop gap tool will work. We have to extract the communist cancer which completely destroyed the democrat party and is well on its way to consuming the GOP.

The ruling elite must be removed from office so we can then focus on the root cause of all these malignant tumor cells in government and that would mean eliminating public schools.

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