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I did. I guess I'm in the "held to higher standards" camp. I don't have the honorific "The Honorable" before my name at the office.

I was going to say of all the Freepers to write this, you'd be the last that I'd expect to do it, but I held my pen.

I know the Framers expected the politicians who fill federal offices to be imperfect men. They chose to divise divided power to counter it, not to excuse it as "everybody does it."

Madison (densely) writes in Federalist #46:

But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm. Every government would espouse the common cause. A correspondence would be opened. Plans of resistance would be concerted. One spirit would animate and conduct the whole.
But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity. In the contest with Great Britain, one part of the empire was employed against the other. The more numerous part invaded the rights of the less numerous part. The attempt was unjust and unwise; but it was not in speculation absolutely chimerical. But what would be the contest in the case we are supposing? Who would be the parties? A few representatives of the people would be opposed to the people themselves; or rather one set of representatives would be contending against thirteen sets of representatives, with the whole body of their common constituents on the side of the latter.
The only refuge left for those who prophesy the downfall of the State governments is the visionary supposition that the federal government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition. The reasonings contained in these papers must have been employed to little purpose indeed, if it could be necessary now to disprove the reality of this danger. That the people and the States should, for a sufficient period of time, elect an uninterupted succession of men ready to betray both; that the traitors should, throughout this period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the States should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism.

They called on the people to rise to the job, and warned us on what to look out for. I don't think they meant for us to excuse it as "oh, well... there goes one of us." Madison did not expect a people to stand idly by while a never-ending series of politicians repeatedly abused the largesse of the people until it was too late to act.

Flawed or not, he expected the people to swiftly replace such people.

-PJ