We, as a nation, need desperately to regain control of our federal government..!! Rescinding the 17th. and getting our senators back under control of the individual states would be a great start....MHO
We shall learn to prize the checks and balances of a free government, and even those of the modern aristocracies, if we recollect the miseries of Greece which arose from their ignorance of them. The only balance attempted against the ancient kings was a body of nobles; and the consequences were perpetual altercations of rebellion and tyranny, and butcheries of thousands upon every revolution from one to the other. When the kings were abolished, the aristocracies tyrannized; and then no balance was attempted but between aristocracy and democracy. This, in the nature of things, could be no balance at all, and therefore the pendulum was for ever on the swing. It is impossible to read in Thucydides, lib. iii. his account of the factions and confusions throughout all Greece, which were introduced by this want of an equilibrium, without horror. During the few days that Eurymedon, with his troops, continued at Corcyra, the people of that city extended the massacre to all whom they judged their enemies. The crime alleged was, their attempt to overturn the democracy. Some perished merely through private enmity; some, for the money they had lent, by the hands of the borrower. Every kind of death, every dreadful act, was perpetrated. Fathers slew their children; some were dragged from altars, some were butchered at them; numbers, immersed in temples, were starved. The contagion spread through the whole extent of Greece: factions raged in every city; the licentious many contending for the Athenians, and the aspiring few for the Lacedæmonians. The consequence was, seditions in cities, with all their numerous and tragical incidents. Such things ever will be, says Thucydides, so long as human nature continues the same. But if this nervous historian had known a balance of three powers, he would not have pronounced the distemper so incurable, but would have added — so long as parties in cities remain unbalanced.
John Adams....
It grinds me, with the lessons of history at our fingertips, so few are willing to consult them.