Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Yes, it's really that bad. KR Washington Bureau: “The government's top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan.”

I am in awe of the genius of the Framers, who correctly warned us of the dangers of “faction” — the creation of party systems to which loyalty is greater than to the commonweal.

I am rueful of the fallibility of the Framers, who designed a system that:

1. tends so strongly to “faction” that there is no chance at all the either party would make executive branch heads roll even for a fraud of this magnitude;
2. hasn't scaled as well as it needed to — the imbalances in representation we have now in both voter/Senator and electoral votes/voter are much greater than they ever contemplated;
3. has too few antibodies generally against a morally corrupt bankrupt regime in the White House.

Of course, the Framers worked on assumptions about the nature of social relations, the economy, (small-R) republicanism, virtue, natural aristocracy and many other things that makes their world view at least different from mine if not downright archaic. Which is why stories like this one make me wonder if the 'great experiment' is going as well as it should…

(Other fulminations at TPM & BD's SDJ)