Go Blago!

Rod Blagojavich is [pause while searching for a precise, delicious word and coming up with...] an idiot.

The fact that another Illinois politician has proven to be fantastically, willfully corrupt is really no surprise, though having the balls to try to sell an open senate seat while the media is still in Illinois covering (not to say celebrating) the ongoing BHO transition (not to say ascension) is pretty dumb. It's even dumb if you assume that Illinois is so corrupt and the media to infatuated, like a bunch of 7th-grade girls who think that pretty boy down the hall is just dreamy, to notice, since there was a grand jury investigation underway into corruption in the governor's office when he indulged in this tawdry shenaniganry.

I was reminded throughout this simply delicious episode that being in the opposition, as I now am, and finding oneself blissfully relieved of the constant grim obligation to defend the indefensible things that government is usually doing, has its moments of relief. Or comic relief.

Let me be the first to simply say, suck it Blago. You and Elliot Spitzer can go hang out and play canasta with Ted Stevens for a decade or so and stay the hell out of my wallet.

Is this what life was like for everyone before the advent of the cursed 17th Amendment to the Constitution (the third-worst amendment ever; see if you can guess the other two!), or just in the Workers' Republic of Illinois? Recall that in the halcyon days before Woodrow Wilson, state legislators directly appointed all US Senators, leaving half the Federal government directly accountable and beholden to the state governments. So it was similar to virtually every other Amendment to the Constitution and every significant Supreme Court decision, all of which have evolved our tender Federal government in one direction only: toward the constant accumulation of power at the expense of state governments and the people collectively (DC v. Heller being the exception that proves the rule). This modern and more democratic measure of popular election of US Senators is less than a hundred years old. It seems odd or even blasphemous for me to cast about in an unabashadly undemocratic fashion calling this transfer of power from the political elite to the people a major contributor to the evils facing the country. But it is.

Reread your Federalist Papers, especially #45-46, authored by James Madison. There was a time in America when it was possible to venture the following argument about the balance of power between the federal government and the state governments:

The State governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former. Without the intervention of the State legislatures, the President of the United States cannot be elected at all. They must in all cases have a great share in his appointment, and will, perhaps, in most cases, of themselves determine it. The Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the State legislatures. ... Thus, each of the principal branches of the federal government will owe its existence more or less to the favor of the State governments, and must consequently feel a dependence, which is much more likely to beget a disposition too obsequious than too overbearing towards them. On the other side, the component parts of the State governments will in no instance be indebted for their appointment to the direct agency of the federal government, and very little, if at all, to the local influence of its members. (Federalist 45)

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. The same combinations, in short, would result from an apprehension of the federal, as was produced by the dread of a foreign, yoke; and unless the projected innovations should be voluntarily renounced, the same appeal to a trial of force would be made in the one case as was made in the other. But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity.
(Federalist 46)

What degree of madness indeed. Voila, in less than a hundred years, the gift that is the 17th Amendment keeps on giving, and has given us demagogues for senators, elected by a large enough body of people that they can be known by essentially none of their own constituents and must fail astonishingly before they can really be held accountable. I put it to you that the Federal government we have today, which has reduced the states to mere administrative entities in all but name, could never have achieved such total dominance over the states without the Senate having first gotten off the hook of having to report directly to the state legislatures for appointment.

It's hardly surprising that pre-17th Amendment Senatorial appointments were allegedly frequently tainted by backroom deals among the state legislatures. But is that really any worse than we apparently have now, with Blago going shopping in Illinois and an omnipotent and unapproachable federal government getting ready to give my hard-earned tax dollars away to those among us who made the worst decisions on home financing, and to companies that have made such a hash of relations with their employees that they have managed to burn through $18 billion in cash in the last 3 months.

Anyone who thinks the bailout passing Congress today will be a good investment for taxpayers hasn't been paying much attention. A bankruptcy makes so much sense on every level that only a bunch of politicians could fail to notice. For any company that made a crap product using labor that was twice as costly as their foreign-branded competition and tried to do so while shouldering decades of legacy labor costs into what's looking like a major recession, a bankruptcy would be a great opportunity for a do-over: unless, of course, the doubly-priced and under-efficient labor group is a major constituency of the majority party in Congress and the White House. Usually the democrats want judges to be deciding policy for everyone (I really don't need to cite an example here, do I?) because they know their scattershot social mumbyjack wouldn't fly in open elections. Why not allow a bankruptcy judge to decide what contracts GM can and cannot afford to keep without modifications?

Raise your hand if you think that GM's political charade of a plan will succeed in any serious way. Not the feel-good way of liberal official Washington, but the hard steely-eyed marketplace reality that all these "green" cars are either less desirable, or more expensive, or both, compared to what GM has been making already for years--or, presumably, GM would already have been making these highly desirable and highly profitable green small cars all along, no? They've designed a business rescue plan around what will please our anointed betters in Congress with their Haight-Ashbury sensibilities about environmentalism (I'm looking at you, Pelosi) or their UAW obsequiousness (Levin, Voinovich) or their desire to simply be able to touch and bless every individual dollar ever spent on anything in this country before it can be actually spent (gosh, so many examples, but Chris Dodd and the evil Barney Frank will suffice). They've done all this at the expense of any real and serious discussion of how this magical infusion of cash and happiness and grooviness is going to actually make money. As one who's about to become an owner of GM (thanks, Barney) I have some interest in knowing whether they'll actually be able to become profitable, and I fear I must confess to not seeing it.

So either (a) GM discovers a magical way to make small green cars profitably, without major overhauls to their union labor contracts, which they've never done before; or (b) they essentially burn through the $34B they're about to be given, transferring it to generally democrat union laborers as payments above-market-rate for their labor to produce cars no one really wants now that gas hit $1.49 today. In the former case you get to leave snotty messages at my blog saying "told you so," and I'll stand humbly corrected. In the latter case GM will be back for another $50 billion in six months, and once we've firmly established that they are too big, and the economy too fragile, for them to be allowed to fail, they'll get that second installment too.

Care to offer odds as to which is likelier?