[LS]

Come on. Patronage was invented almost exclusively by Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, and the Dems in the 1820s as a means to win elections, and the Whigs, then Republicans, had to copy it to get elected. Gerrymandering was of course in the Constitution, named after Elbridge Gerry, one of the FOUNDERS!

Read the first four chapters of my book, "A Patriot's History of the United States."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595230017/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/104-0426693-1426353?%5Fencoding=UTF8

We cover this in great detail. SLOW change is the way the Founders wanted it. Every mechanism was designed to slow the system down: staggered elections of house/senate, only electing 1/3 of the senate in a given year, filibusters, etc.

[dr_who_2]

Come on. Patronage was invented almost exclusively by Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, and the Dems in the 1820s as a means to win elections, and the Whigs, then Republicans, had to copy it to get elected. Gerrymandering was of course in the Constitution, named after Elbridge Gerry, one of the FOUNDERS!

It would be understating things to say that something that originated with pre-Roosevelt (Franklin or Theodore) states rights "Dems" has really caught on since then. Slow decay is of course preferable to cataclysmic change, but that's beside the point. In some cases, it's postponing the inevitable and making the problem worse, decade by decade, and there have been plenty already. "Worse", as in endanging the republic wanted by the founders, those fellows you lionize when it's convenient to.