Replies

That is the big lesson of the British version of the House of Cards. If Machiavelli is the undergraduate course on power, House of Cards is the graduate school seminar on the subject.

The point is that power is kind of an elusive thing. You can keep it only so long as you are using it to benefit the people who gave you the power. Fail that and you lose. Do that and you may lose anyways as concerns shift to things you can't do.

So a self-absorbed game to keep power and keep it for your ingroup is doomed to failure if that is all you do. You are just creating your own vacuum of irrelevancy to fill.

To wit the utter down-deafness of the power elite to the border/immigration crisis and denial that it is even a problem. THEY created their own irrelevancy.

As a group, elites don’t have the same voice as they once did because the number of elites has expanded, so you don’t have groups that have a high level of authority. For example, you once had senior clerics in this country who had a profound moral voice. I grew up in Boston and I’m Jewish but if Cardinal Richard Cushing said something, then people would really pay attention. Presidents of the great university played a role in our national debate that they do not play right now. Because power has gotten very diffuse, it’s sometimes in the hands of people who are irresponsible. Look at Congress. Our committee chairs are not powerful anymore. The Speaker of the House once was powerful. We’ve watched several of them get defenestrated. The elites lost their moral authority and there is no coherent leadership group rising in its place.

No. These positions are still powerful. Look at Manchurian Mitch and his strangle hold on his office. As I stated above, the problem is that they are using their power to get and keep power, in abject ignorance and recognition of any problem that concerns the People from whom you get power by whatever licit or ilicit mechanism that happens.

A lot of politicians whine, a lot of them are cowardly, a lot fear their own followers.

The author kind of geets it. This is spot on. You are a servant of the people, but you are afraid of the people because what you want to do is not what they wnat you to do. So you are a RINO who tries to survive by dissing MAGA voters who are the committed half of the GOP electorate.

Our politicians are weak, corrupt, craven. Worse they are insane. They refuse to do what they obviously need to do to keep their voters pacified. Not securing the border is not palmed off in the same way as too many potholes and erratic garbage collection - though mayors have lost office for this last thing.

Party politics rewards the most slippery, backstabbing, low character people. We need to get rid of party politics. While everyone has the right to free association we don’t have to allow party affiliation to appear on ballots and we don’t have to allow party primaries in the states. Just have an election, put everyone who wants the job on the ballot and let them campaign on their ideas.

We could also limit how much money can be spent on a campaign and maybe even eliminate most forms of campaign advertising. Just a platform to express their views and positions.

Thank you for referencing that article Twotone.

"More than other places, in D.C., the best use of power is not to discharge it toward solving some real or concrete problem that exists in the world, but to use power to create even more power [??? emphasis added]."

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

Regarding "use power to create even more power" mentioned in the referenced article, not only is the Constitution's Article V suspiciously not mentioned in the article, but "federal government overreach" probably should have been used instead of saying "use power to create even more power" imo.

Note that federal government overreach was identified as early as the early 1800's, evidenced by the following statement by St. George Tucker, a respected constitutional expert in those days.

"If it were, in fact, an unconstitutional exercise of power in congress to pass a law establishing the bank, nothing can manifest the impropriety of over-stepping the limits of the constitution, more than the act which we have just noticed. It shows that the most unauthorised acts of government may be drawn into precedents to justify other unwarrantable usurpations [emphasis added]." —Article 1, Section 8, Clause 6, St. George Tucker, Blackstone's Commentaries 1:App. 262--64, 1803.
”The system of the General Government is to seize all doubtful ground. We must join in the scramble, or get nothing. Where first occupancy is to give right, he who lies still loses all.” —Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1797.
”I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” —James Madison, Speech at the Virginia Convention to ratify the Federal Constitution (1788-06-06)
”To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.” —Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson's Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank : 1791
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.

Based on St. George Tucker's statement above, it appears the early U.S. legal system was getting English common law mixed up with constitutional law, the legal system inadvertently using common law as a way of bypassing Article V's rules for expanding the federal government's limited powers.