Thank you for that wonderful excerpt. I keep “Democracy in America” handy as a reference finding him to be incredibly prophetic and topical. It would serve us all to heed his reminders. We have yielded to mob rule in an institutional sense rather systemically by amending the Constitution to permit an income tax and by permitting the direct election of what was to be the representative of the states and the states’ political interests, i.e. senators. Again, thanks.
I remember one of the arguments against our Constitution was that all three branches of government were contained under the same authority. Madison defended that by explaining that the Senate represented the State governments, something that the Seventeenth Amendment changed.
So, our government's powers are all self promoted and self managed. And, they determine their own pay.