There has been a lot of talk recently about Congressional corruption. Quite a few scandals are erupting and it appears that the Republican-controlled Capitol Hill is repeating the errors of its predecessors in varying degrees of gravity. Right-wing media outlets and politicians would have us believe this is isolated and only slightly problematic; the more liberal-tainted media outlets would have us believe that the Republicans have done nothing less than make a pact with Satan himself and have sold the soul of the country for a few bucks and some terrible legislation.
Both views, as usual, are not comprehensive. In fact, Congress is corrupt -- just as it always has been and will remain for the indefinite future. Putting aside the current allegations (not to belittle them, but rather to remain silent on them because my argument now turns elsewhere), corruption is but a continuation of a long-standing tradition within our legislative branch and indeed is part of the foundation of our Congress and one of the reasons, arguably, why ours has succeeded where so many others have failed.
James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers about the evils of factions; and yet ultimately a major part of the argument for a large republic stems from the idea that any one group attaining a large swathe of power with which to bully the population of a state is stalled by the attempts of everyone else to attain such power. This sort of mutually assured destruction on a legislative scale supposedly maintains -- and indeed does appear to have maintained -- the largest possible pragmatic amount of liberty in our nation while most effectively killing the power of what we could call in modern language "interest groups."
Far be it from this author to question the authority of Madison or any other great political thinker, so rather than attacking this logic head-on, let us look at its implications. Our federal government has run effectively for over 200 years now on the quasi-democratic principle that if everyone is grabbing for the pie, it will end up divided into reasonable portions. A quick reference to human history and contemporary foreign conditions -- because it is the only way to compare our progress, not because of any belief that the nature of foreign states bears any repercussions for the goings on of any one particular state -- shows that those who founded our nation and those who have run it to this day have by and large succeeded in maintaining what I would argue is certainly one of the most free nations to ever grace some unnamed intelligent designer's green earth -- though not without much protest from those very founders and subsequent politicians.
The one major problem with a combative view of government set forth by a belief that greedy participants keep the power isolated and controlled is that it necessarily shifts what the objective of government should be. The objective of our government should be, and is laid forth eloquently in our Constitution, that it exists to maintain the freedom and security of our people. Instead, because of a combative view of legislation and an interpretation of the Constitution that allows for what has become the norm, our Congress has become nothing more than an embodiment of what Bastiat termed "the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If this view is too extreme to sit well with you, consider another problem it causes aside from the undesirable issue of everyone having his hands in everyone else's pockets and lives through entirely legal means: our friend, pork barrel legislation. Pork comes from nowhere other than the same exact source of corruption, and indeed can be viewed as a form of corruption. It simply is just corruption on the old-fashioned geographically- oriented faction scale, as opposed to our newfangled ideologically-oriented factions. Our Congress is busy permitting bridges to nowhere, scrambling to save bloated and arguably unnecessary military bases and passing resolutions argued on the taxpayer's dollar and printed on paper paid for by the taxpayer's dollar which congratulate "Tony Stewart on winning the 2005 NASCAR Nextel Cup Championship" (HRES 587).
These tragedies of modern American politics, these acts of blatantly cut-throat corruption, necessitate a change of opinion and view of government on an unprecedented, huge scale. Fiascos like those seen in recent years will only continue until we, the voters, stop voting and giving money to these modern fat cats. Until we do, Congress will gladly fiddle away more resolutions supporting Christmas (HRES 579) while Rome burns.
