Since Jack Abramoff copped to a plea deal and
revealed having given large sums of money to a great many
Congressmen and Senators, the usual suspects have given their usual
reactions:
• The affected politicians seek absolution by
passing “lobbying reform” (as if they couldn’t have just said “no”
in the first place) which neither stops lobbying nor reforms it in
any real way, but sure lets them pompously grandstand for the TV
cameras.
• They compound this by passing ever more
unconstitutional campaign finance reforms which trash the First
Amendment and ensure no real competition for their jobs can ever
raise the money they need. They ought to call it what it really is:
the Incumbent Protection Act.
• The citizenry, when not stifling yawns, gets
all shocked and outraged that the people whom they put in charge of
$2.34 TRILLION dollars every year and power reaching far beyond even
that unfathomably enormous budget might get a tad bit corrupted by
it.
With all due respect, just what on earth did
anyone really expect? That we could send so much power and money to
Washington DC and not have lots of people trying to get a
piece of it? That a pie that large could just sit there without a
lot of people trying to get a slice of their own? That these people
wouldn’t find it worthwhile to grease the skids a little in order to
achieve that end? Or that the 535 angelic pie bakers would be
utterly immune to outside influence? Are we really that
naive?
The only way to stop the Abramoffs and their
politician clients is to shrink government. No one will spend their
time and money trying to bribe Congressmen if they don’t have
anything worth buying. And the less power Congress has, the fewer
things it can control, the more of a waste it will be. That
lobbying has become so endemic and that Congressmen have grown so
arrogant that they think nothing of quashing political speech to
protect their cushy jobs is a flagrant indictment of big government
and the liberal ideology that promotes it.
The even more frightening truth of the matter is
that many of these “donations” are really blood money in a political
shakedown racket to keep Congressmen and Senators from taxing,
regulating, and litigating entire industries out of existence with
the stroke of a pen. Lobbying all too often isn’t something an
interest does to cheat its way ahead of a competitor, but is to
ensure they can stay in the game at all. That Congress has assumed
that kind of power to itself should scare us all; after all, the
only thing needed for you to be in their crosshairs is to be
involved in what they choose to demonize this month. (From smoking,
to fast food, to alcohol, to you name it.) And where government
power increases, liberty necessarily retreats.
Having said all this, I do not personally condemn
any of the 535 corrupt overlords we call Congress; it flies in the
face of human nature to think that anyone (present company
absolutely included) could be in charge of so much and not be
corrupted to the core by it. Lord Acton was right: “Power corrupts;
absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The question is why we as
Americans persist in giving Congress so much of it when we know what
the result of doing so must inevitably be. (Not to mention that our
supreme law, the U.S. Constitution, is supposed to carefully
circumscribe Congress’ power; read Article I and the 9th
& 10th Amendments if you don’t believe me.) That someone
could have trillions of dollars to spend and do it honorably and
honestly would be the real shocker.
We must reclaim responsibility for those tasks in
life that are rightfully ours, no matter how much we may wish to
shirk them. Liberty and responsibility are a package deal; one
cannot claim the former without accepting the latter. Only then can
we shrink government to its properly Constitutional size and in so
doing prevent future Jack Abramoffs and Congressmen from doing what
they otherwise will always do. If we do not do this, the least we
can do as citizens is stop feigning surprise when we discover, to
our mock horror, that power and money result in corruption. It’s
only the natural and deserved result of free citizens giving away
their liberty.
