One of my grad school professors explained that his German grandfather had one simple rule of parenting: find out what the children are doing and make them stop. I'm not sure that that is a good rule for dealing with children, but its dead spot on for dealing with Congress whenever they turn to reforming the political process. For reasons Dr. Schaff skillfully lays out below, earlier reforms have made the problem much worse. The only way to get money out of politics is to get politics out of money. But that would require radically shrinking the Federal Government in size and scope. That isn't going to happen. The most enduring legacy of the Abramoff scandal will almost certainly be another round of pernicious reforms, as Republicans move to protect their fannies.
I doubt that this will do a great deal of damage to Republicans, but it is going to be a Republican scandal. I have often used the story of the Keating Five as a good example of divided government. Charles Keating corrupted four important Senators. John McCain was not really tainted by the scandal, and was only included because met with Keating and because otherwise there wouldn't have been any Republicans involved. If the Senate had been the lone legislative body, we never would have heard about the scandal. But Henry Gonzalez, Democrat and Chair of the House Banking Committee, aggressively investigated the scandal. That's what James Madison had in mind. Why, I ask my students, did the scandal's damage fall almost exclusively on Democrats? Not because they are less honest than Republicans, but only because they held the majority.
The Republicans will suffer now because they hold the majority. Its no use arguing that this sort of thing happens all the time. Glen Reynolds of Instapundit was on NPR today, and pointed out that bank robbery happens all the time, but that doesn't mean its okay. It is also worthy of note that, just as a Democrat exposed his fellows in the Keating Five scandal, so a Republican, John McCain is going after this one. McCain, I say, is the one to watch.
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