This first-person account by Jim Newell of Slate is being widely quoted: “A Brief, Concerning Conversation With Dianne Feinstein”
It was about a minute later that I encountered Feinstein coming off an elevator, sitting in a wheelchair and flanked by staff. It’s been hard to find the senator since her return; she’s kept her movements mostly to the least-populated passageways and skipped luncheons and non-urgent committee hearings.
I asked her how she was feeling.
“Oh, I’m feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.” A fellow reporter staking out the elevator asked what was wrong with the leg.
“Well, nothing that’s anyone concern but mine,” she said.
When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.
“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.
OK.
“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”
When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.
“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”
After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, who’ve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away.
Senator Feinstein, who is 89, appears to have forgotten that she was in hospital with shingles for two and a half months.
The left wing journalist Mehdi Hasan tweets,
If you’re a Democratic senator and you’re not at least privately urging Feinstein to resign, and urging Schumer and Durbin to take action, you have failed the people who sent you to Congress. You’re lying to yourselves that this 👇🏽 is *okay*
He is right, but Feinstein’s is not the only photograph that could be placed below that downward-pointing finger.
Stop picking on the incompetent and unworthy! This sort of prejudice must cease!
They’re like those decrepit old farts we used to laugh at standing on that balcony at the Kremlin watching the Soviet Army march past every May Day. They just cannot even consider giving up the power and prestige of being on Capitol Hill and retiring to a few quiet years because right now, they matter. Enjoying their grandkids back home mean they are irrelevant and that is a fate worse than death. Their egos mean they have to stay. We saw it with RBG, John McCain, Ted Kennedy, and we’re seeing it now with her and Biden.
Personally I think the citizens of California thoroughly deserve having Senator Feinstein as one of their senators for life, and democrats who object should be thrown in jail for being intolerant, ageist,sexist, ableist and so forth. This is the politics they have chosen and they deserve it good and hard. 😉
While I don’t support mandatory retirement ages, if firms insist on them when cognitive sharpness is a vital matter, then I have no complaints, particularly if the age limit is in the contract. For example, in the UK and several other nations, an air traffic controller retires by the age of 60.
It is not quite the same for, say, a senator. Plenty of political figures have been able to stay on top of events and their jobs well into their 70s and 80s, but clearly there are issues. I write a bit in my day job about issues such as lasting powers of attorney. If this politician were a purely private individual, I suspect that her family and close friends would be now using LPA powers to handle issues such as financial matters.
Given what is going on with Feinstein, and probably the POTUS, it seems extraordinary that this situation can persist. The only upside is that it brings into sharp relief that these people don’t really “run” their jobs, but are puppets being manipulated by people who should know better. I cannot believe voters will ignore this much longer.
The situation amounts to elderly abuse. It is a fucking disgrace.
By the way, it turns out that a Chinese spy worked with this Senator for years.
I eagerly await the appointment of a horse to the senate.
I have to be honest… I think that a very large component of our issues with the US form of government are due to scaling issues. Back in the day, when the Constitution was written, the ratio of voters to congressional Representatives was roughly 60,000 to 1. Now? It’s roughly 800,000 to 1.
You don’t mean anything to your Representative, really. You have zero influence, unless you have backing of a significant number of that 800,000 people they’re beholden to.
This isn’t a good thing. In my humble opinion, you ought to have far fewer people to each elected representative. Yet, at the same time, were we to have the six thousand-plus representatives necessary to meet the old ratio, that’d make Congress completely unwieldly. Square that circle, if you can.
An option might be to insert another layer in between the state and federal governments, a regional one. Maintain the Federal level, but give a regional government level a say in the whole thing. That could be set up so as to be more responsive than what we have right now, where there are so many voters to each representative that everything is drastically fractionated.
I’d leave the Feinstein question solely to her voters. If they want to elect a zombie, it’s their business.
It just goes to show that the more important question is who is on the Senator’s or Representative’s staff than who is elected…
Which is entirely wrong. Not sure how you fix that; look at who Fetterman’s Chief of Staff used to work for. He’s not even from Pennsylvania.
I think that there ought to be a rule that every staff member has to be a proven resident of the district that elected the Congressman, and they have to go home at the end of the term, unable to work for anyone else in government. Ever.
A puppet with a fully functioning brain can decide, at any time, that they are not going to be a puppet any more.
That is why the bureaucracy prefer people like Diane Feinstein (who does not know where she is), John Fetterman (“elected” many months AFTER a massive stroke destroyed much of his brain) and Joseph Biden – a person who only the most powerful medications can make semi functional (and only for short periods of time).
These people do not have fully functioning brains, they can not decide not to be puppets – because they do not even know they are puppets.
Of the three, Diane Feinstein may actually have been elected (the remaining population of California are so leftist they will vote for anyone the left-hand-path, which leads to somewhere even hotter that California, tells them to vote for), the “elections” for Mr Fetterman and Mr Biden were openly rigged – but it does not matter, because the media (and the courts) do not care if American elections are rigged.
The bureaucracy, both government and corporate, loves the “election” of such people – because it humiliates the population, at least that part of the population who are not yet totally corrupted (unlike the collectivist fanatics who make up the juries in places such Washington D.C. and New York City – who take a perverted pride in convicting the innocent and finding innocent the obviously guilty).
The bureaucracy, both government and corporate, are making-a-point by having such candidates nominated and “elected”.
Kirk: The system was set up to cope with the numbers thing, it’s a federation. Unfortunately, there has been over a century of the federation sucking in huge amounts of power and control into itself. That’s not how a federation is supposed to work. History has shown again and again that centralising authority destroys a society, distributed authority allows a society to thrive.
@jgh,
No, the system was not set up “to cope with the numbers thing”. You can find references to the Founders who thought that representation ought to be around 50,000 people per Representative, while the Senate was supposed to be representing the interests of the State governments in the Federal Government. We started suborning that when we capped the number of Representatives and began direct-election of Senators.
It’s too damn big to really work, at this point. The diffusion across so many people makes it nearly impossible for the average citizen to influence his Representative effectively.
I don’t think the Founders envisioned the monstrosity we’ve grown government into, nor do I think they ever thought we’d be as big as we are.
– Feinstein has actually brought a lot of money and influence into her district over the past thirty years. I can see how her constituents were quite happy with her in the 90’s and the early 2000’s. Now she just survives on the “well-loved” aspects of her tenure, while voting the way her voters prefer.
– Personally, I want my rep to hire the best staffers possible. Placing bounds on those positions would just impede what the politician can accomplish. Decades ago, I was a short-time low staffer for a MN senator, even though I didn’t live in the district. He would have not had the benefits of my work if he could only hire certain people, and I wouldn’t have taken the job if it restricted my future possibilities.
BS. She is still a vote, and her votes go the way her constituents want them to go. It’s their choice, not Schumer’s or Durbin’s, as to who reps the state. We have elections, not party assignments.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, individualists (i.e. the right) want the best individual to lead, collectivists don’t care who leads as long as they are a member of the collective.
Sooooo… You think that I’m being well-served by my local Congressional representation having “professional Congressional staff” with zero connection to my district and state? Is that what you’re saying? Do you not see that the proliferation of these characters is precisely the same sort of BS that you had with the various eunuchs of the court in the Byzantine and Chinese empires?
I don’t particularly care about “quality”; I care that they’re doing what I want them to be doing. Not some crazed national-level ideology they learned at some “school of government” back East.
I don’t think you get the problem, to be quite honest. The mere existence of these creatures of the night that are making hand-puppets out of our legislators is the real problem with a lot of the idiocy we have going on.
Ever wonder how those ten-thousand page bills get written, when your Congresscreature can barely string together two coherent words at the same time? Simple; it’s not them doing the work. And, if they’re not the ones doing the work, then who the hell am I voting for? Why isn’t that POS Chief of Staff for Fetterman the one running for office in Pennsylvania, out in the open?
Good Christ, it’s like you want to institutionalize the Grand Vizier methodology of governance, or something.
There should be no “professional” politicians or “staff” for them, period. Not in a representational democratic republic, not if you don’t want the powers-behind-the-throne taking over. Hell, that’s exactly what’s going on in DC, right now: Unelected bureaucrats and staffers taking over the roles that legislators and elected officials are supposed to be doing.
And, if you have the balls to say that “Well, it’s too complicated for mere mortal elected representatives to handle…”, then I’m going to point out that if that’s the actual case, then they’ve got no business taking on that much power in the first damn place.
That whole fiasco with Obamacare should have led to a wholesale sacking of everyone involved in it, from legislator to executive to the judiciary that let them get away with that travesty. Signing bills that give unelected bureaucrats extensive regulation-making authority, with no idea what’s in them? Ought to be a capital crime, for a politician. Period. “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it…” No, Nancy… That just means we need to pass you through a woodchipper.
Clear abrogation of duties as a legislator. If you have someone else writing your legislation for you because “complex”, well… Maybe that’s a sign that it’s too f*cking complex to work.
I used to work for a guy in the Army, whose rule of thumb about Operations Orders was that if it couldn’t fit onto the sleeve of a rations box in letters big enough to be read from the back of the fourth rank, then it was too complicated to work. Never saw that rule fail to hold true, and there’s probably some similar rule of thumb which should be applied to legislation and law in general. If you can’t figure out the clear meaning with a sixth-grade reading ability, then the guys who wrote it ought to be fired.
Of course, were it up to me? I’d treat being a lawyer like being a monk; you go before the bar, you’re a special class that ain’t got no right to vote, and can only advise on the law. Letting lawyers write laws is just plain stupid, putting the fox in charge of security at the henhouse. Of course they’re not going to write simple, workable laws–That’d be against self-interest and cost them money. So, they should not be writing laws at all, let alone voting on them.
@bobby b
Placing bounds on those positions would just impede what the politician can accomplish.
Isn’t that the point?
@Fraser Orr,
You get it. The less my politicians “accomplish”, the happier I am. Especially with the set of malign dolts we have running things in DC, these days.
The fact that they’ve not run Fetterman and Feinstein out of town on rails for not meeting the basic standards of cognitive functioning is a telling thing. Same with Biden, who was never all that bright or all that accomplished even in his youth.
I’m from the West Coast. I have no reason to know anything in particular about any East Coast Senator. I knew that Biden was an utter moron with zero accomplishments before I entered high school in the late 1970s. That fact ought to tell you something about him.
Well, since I’m speaking of myself, yeah, that is what I’m saying, except I’d dispute that “zero connection” part. My connection was the fact that I was hired to do a job, and I wanted to progress by doing a good job.
Constituent Services. I was specifically doing what the constituents wanted me to be doing. On the Senator’s behalf, since he had a few other duties, too.
No wondering. The hired lawyers wrote them, pursuant to direction by the Senator and staff.
Well, the job is too complicated and complex and voluminous for any one individual to handle. Ever. That’s why they get staff. Lots of staff.
Letting non-lawyers write laws results in chaos. You don’t hire plumbers to write contracts. A non-lawyer writes a murder statute and you end up banning Eskimos, because the non-lawyer’s language is so legally imprecise.
Who should be running them out of town? If you say the voters in their states, sure. Anyone else, and you’ve abrogated that whole democracy thing.
I want the freedom to vote in someone who is insane, but on my side. If some other pol then tells me “no, we don’t like your choice, try again”, that’s the stuff of revolution.
Why should we be more outraged about the inanity of a member of Congress than their constituents? It’s their business. Just makes our own members more valuable.
bobby b – many elections in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are bent.
There are books on the degree of electoral corruption in individual counties of Pennsylvania, let alone the whole State.
Ignoring a problem does not make the problem go away.
As for the idea that Joseph Biden was honestly elected President of the United States in 2020 – anyone, at this point, who still believes that is living in a fantasy.
Again, ignoring a problem does not make the problem go away.
The States of the United States must adopt a system of paper ballots, cast after proper I.D. is shown, and counted in public – or give up all the talk of “elected government” and so on.
At this point, only term limits can partly solve the system issues, like corruption and embedded incompetents. You do 2 terms and you’re out for at least 2 terms. Alongside clear limits on what governments can do.
Democracy is the least worst system, which means that some rules must exist to reduce the worst parts.
monoi.
If American elections, in some States (such as Arizona), continue to be rigged – then term limits are pointless.
Again, ignoring a problem (in this case the problem of rigged elections) does not make the problem go away.
There must be paper ballots, cast only after showing secure I.D., and counted in public.
The Founders thought that the majority of “the state” would be done by The States. They didn’t envisage the federal part of the federation exploding in size and sucking power so much.
My American friend, currently trying to leave California, reckons that Feinstein can’t retire, as she will lose her protection, knowing where the bodies are buried. An ex-Senator, as opposed to a sitting Senator, “committing suicide” would only make the headlines for a day.
bobby b said:
D’ya think that might, just might, be a sign that the legislature has gotten itself into territory that it damn well shouldn’t be in?
There’s something we term the “Rule of Three” in the military, which basically works out to dealing with the limitations on the span of control that one man can manage. You can usually effectively lead and supervise the activities of only three other people at a given time, which is why you see this number show up so often in military organization–Three men and a leader equal a fire team, two to three fire teams make a squad, three squads make a platoon, and three platoons typically make a company.
I’d submit that there are similar rules in effect for just how much a piece of legislation or a legislator should be doing, and that when you have ten thousand page pieces of legislation that have to be passed in order to find out what’s in them, as though it were some sort of Christmas present for the various lobbyists and “special interest groups”? I think that’s indicative of a certain systemic legislative hubris, and a sign that the involved people need to have their asses kicked by their constitutents.
We only got to Obamacare because of sixty-odd years of legislative meddling and self-contradiction; attempting to fix that in one massive bill signed in the dead of night against partisan lines? Baby, all of the involved parties should have been fired by the voters in the next election. That whole thing was legislative over-reach, and past the bounds of any rational legislative capacity to make work. The reason why we have to deal with a sclerotic and dysfunctional Federal government comes out of over a hundred years of this BS, enabled by your idea about “complexity” requiring “paid professional staff” for the legislator. Frankly, if the asshole can’t manage it on his own, he shouldn’t be doing it. Period.
Enabling this mindless bullshit is how we got to where we are, today. You can’t control this crap to this level of detail, and trying to? All you’re doing is making bank for all the rent-seeking assholes of the world, providing them with opportunities for graft.
None of the things that Congress has stuck its nose into over the last century or so have been in keeping with the intent of the Founders, who had a fairly good idea about human flaws. Most of the crap they do, these days? Fixing other crap they did a generation or two ago, and which they never should have touched in the first damn place, except for the brilliant work of their “staffs”. Which they should not have, in the first place.
Speaking of which, who, precisely, votes for these staffs? What recourse do the voters have, when those staff members don’t do as the electorate wills? Justify their existence, please, particularly with regard to their being out of reach for the average voter to even influence?
I’ve dealt with the staffers on my local Congressional delegation. Most of them are not from here, have never lived here, and have also never left Washington DC. That fact alone militates towards the idea that they should not exist, as such. You ought to hear about the local guys complaining about trying to get the assholes in DC to even pay attention to them, let alone do anything. We don’t have local representation, really: We have someone who goes to DC, gets captured by the system, and then does whatever the hell their peers in DC are doing. Is that right, do you suppose? Is it workable, in the long term?
System’s gotten too damn big for the way it was designed, in my opinion. Way too big; most of our issues stem from this, and the overweening desire by the assholes running the whole thing to “do things”, things which mostly should not be done in the first damn place, and which are unrealistic for government to even be attempting.
One of the points I think you lot are missing, the “big, complicated government” adherents, is that there are bounds to complexity and management. You can’t effectively manage something as chaotic as an entire economy, and it’s madness to even try. That’s where socialism and communism fall down; the inherent imperfection of human perception and ability to plan and account for all variables in the complex environment that is an economy. That you guys in “big government” don’t grasp that you’re effectively trying to do the same things that the central planners of the Soviet Union were trying to do and failed miserably? That seems like it’s impossible for y’all to comprehend.
There’s a lot of crap that simply has to be allowed to work out on its own, and trying to address it via the good offices of “making a law” is utter madness. Enabling the legislature to make more and more complex laws is a net negative, because it can’t work out over the long haul. Particularly when you take the attitude that once enacted, it’s forever enshrined–Look at the Jones Act, for examples. That’s warped the US merchant marine entirely out of alignment with national interest for so long that it’s not even funny, and yet here we are… That’s a piece of legislation that should have had a sunset clause in it, and didn’t. Conditions change; the more you try to control, the more you rely on things staying the same, which they never will.
Complexity is the enemy of liberty and human freedom. The more of it you introduce, the less we have.
@bobby b
Constituent Services. I was specifically doing what the constituents wanted me to be doing. On the Senator’s behalf, since he had a few other duties, too.
I’m sure you did your very best, but surely you agree that “what the constituents want” is a very blunt hammer. That thousand page bill? The constituents generally speaking know what the title says… in fact that isn’t true, they usually don’t even know that. Which leaves a lot of scope for people with an agenda to insert “what they want” and “what the constituents want” be damned.
Letting non-lawyers write laws results in chaos.
I don’t doubt that is true, but it raises a few concerns for me:
1. Certainly lawyers have the training to write the laws, however, I am expected to obey the laws. How can I do that if the meaning is so subtle that it requires years of legal training to write them?
2. With regards to the law, my question is “aren’t you done yet”? The purpose of the legislature is to create a legal framework for us to live in. We NEED a stable legal framework: constant capricious change makes doing business and living life extremely difficult — like walking on eggshells; we NEED a simple legal framework: you can’t expect me to obey rules I don’t understand and, in most cases, don’t even know about.
Why do we need new laws? What is wrong with the old ones? Are they so TERRIBLE they need to completely upset the apple cart? I don’t doubt there are some innovations that do need some new law, but most of life is the same as it was ten years ago, why do we need the ten million new pages of law that have been added since then?
And since I am bound by these laws, am I supposed to read them all as they are published? If not how can I keep from breaking the law?
I think it was Madeline Albright who said “When you have a navy you find reasons to use the navy” and so to, if you have dozens of lawyers in your legislative office you are going to keep them busy doing stuff irrespective of whether it is useful, or if it is detrimental.
Who should be running them out of town? If you say the voters in their states, sure. Anyone else, and you’ve abrogated that whole democracy thing.
Yes, you are spot on here. And that I think is the drum I have been beating here since 2022. If the people want, in large majority, the Fettermans, Bidens, Feinsteins and Harris’s (or come to that, the McConnells, Romney’s and McCains) of the world to have powerful political offices then all is really lost. Voting, with such a population, makes things worse not better.
“A republic, if you can keep it” was not a promise but a warning.
The one aspect that our system here in the US fails to address effectively is that of “What do you do about a constituency and legislator that continually act against everyone else’s best interests?”
Yes, I can donate to their opponents, but what am I to do about creatures like Jerry Nadler or Dianne Fienstien? Nancy Pelosi? Can I vote against them, or must I put up with their continual malfeasance and chicanery to benefit their own selfish interests which their constituents apparently are in alignment with?
The system offers us no good answers for the problem presented by these types. Or, the continual dominance of the urban areas over the rural ones, when the effective result is that anyone living outside the catchment area for the major urban obscenities has to put up with the idiotic meddling of city-dwelling morons in the minutiae of country life. Which they don’t understand, don’t want to, and think consists entirely of us providing them with handy recreational areas, as opposed to us making a living out here.
System has become broken, due to the changes in the fundamentals of how the country works. We might want to relook at how we do these things.
Frankly, I think there ought to be a check, one with a sufficiently high cost, in order for people outside the district that belongs to these creatures of darkness to have a say in their continuing careers of damaging everyone else’s best interests.
Either that, or put it all out into the open, making the bribes and other chicanery publicly visible. I’d have no problem with Phizer or Exxon buying the legislation they want, so long as they pay for it and it were up for public bid. Openly. They’re doing it now, we just don’t get to see the sausage being made. Congressmen ought to have to wear their sponsors on their suits the same way that NASCAR drivers do…
Kirk:
Of course I do. But that wasn’t the question addressed.
Who votes for the pens and pencils that a Senator uses? No one. They are tools, expressing what the Senator wishes to be expressed. As are staff.
Not many of those here on a lib website, I think.
Fraser Orr:
A good statute-drafting lawyer produces writing that is clear and unsubtle, and unamenable to off-the-wall interpretations and definitions. Draft a law poorly, and you end up with judges spending the next ten years claiming that a misplaced comma, a careless use of a term, a list meant to be expressive instead of exclusive, means that the law says the opposite of what the legislature intended.
Had a decent lawyer been hired for the task, our Second Amendment would have never started with “(a) well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State . . .” Extraneous verbiage unneeded for the task but proving to be a goldmine of misinterpretation for two-plus centuries.
@bobby b
A good statute-drafting lawyer produces writing that is clear and unsubtle, and unamenable to off-the-wall interpretations and definitions.
Right, this is an excellent point. However, it doesn’t address the core question. How much new law (including not just statute law but administrative regulations) has been passed since the beginning of 2023? Ten thousand pages? Fifty thousand? Perhaps it is all a model of clarity, concision and entirely unambiguous, but how many of those pages have you read? How many even apply to you? Do you even know what applies to you? And you are a lawyer. Me? I can barely keep up with my email.
But a lot of those pages contain criminal sanctions, so you’d better know it or you might end up as Crazy Jimmy’s new cell mate.
Plus, I don’t doubt you know that a lot of law is deliberately written to be ambiguous to give the agencies that administer it a lot of wiggle room and power over their subject serfs. Even the storied Justice Scalia advocated the Chevron deference.
The problem with all those lawyers in the legislative offices is not the quality of their work product, it is the quantity of it.
So I don’t think your argument that it is “according to the voters will” really lines up well with the reality of the legislative process. After all, we have to pass the bill so that we can read it? amirite?
And it is also worth pointing out that perhaps these drafters are excellent at unambiguity, but it seems that if you are determined enough you can make anything say what you want it to say, as long as you audience is receptive to it. After all, the most convincing attribute of an argument is not its logical soundness, but whether you want it to be true. Shall I mention the commerce clause? Shall I mention the extremely capable legal minds that gave us Roe vs Wade? There is a saying in science — “if you torture the data for long enough it will eventually confess.” I think this is probably true of legal texts too.
Fraser Orr, I’m all in on the ideas that we need less government, fewer laws, more local control, etc.
All I’m saying is, if we’re going to have written laws, they should be written by people familiar with how they’re going to be dissected and misinterpreted and re-directed. People who understand “statutory construction” rules. People used to finding and limiting loopholes in contracts.
And it will be “according to the will of the voters” only to the extent that the Senator or other officeholder involved adheres to what his constituents want him to be doing – as will everything out of that office.
@bobby b,
Ain’t nobody saying they can’t advise on legal affairs and the drafting of law; just saying that they shouldn’t be voting on the damn things.
You rattle on about good law, and all that? Have you actually seen the crap these lawyer-run systems are turning out? You have to engage the services of two other lawyers to have it explained to you, and no two lawyers can agree on what is actually in the law…
That ain’t what I would term a positive result.
As a general policy, you don’t put the people who benefit from the system being obtuse and arcane in charge of making it even more obtuse and arcane. Law ought to be clear and concise; if a sixth-grader can’t parse it, you’ve done f*cked up. The fact that there are a lot of cases out there, especially in the laws that require agencies to write supporting regulation that are sufficiently confusing so as to leave even the people who’re putatively in charge of administering the damn things unable to consistently apply them…? Yeah; that’s a sign you’ve got too many lawyers involved in the process of governance.
Lawyers serve a purpose. All I’m submitting is that putting them in charge of writing the laws is a fool’s move. They’re not going to go for “clear and concise”, because that’d mean “unemployment” for many of their peers…
@bobby b: I think it is back to my original point in reply to this:
Placing bounds on those positions would just impede what the politician can accomplish.
Placing bounds on what a politician can accomplish is a good thing, not a bad thing. Why? Generally speaking politicians are power hungry, users who will kiss your baby then stab you in the back. So the less they do the better. Some famous person once said, regarding politics:
“Whatever happens will be for the worst, and therefore it is in our best interest that nothing happens.”
And although perhaps somewhat hyperbolic I think it is a good general sentiment. Do governments do good things? Yes, very, very rarely, but they do bad things very very commonly. So, on net, the less they do the better off we are.
As to democracy, it is a very vague concept, and any idea that it either empowers voters or gives a mandate to politicians has to be seem in light of extreme limitations. I have said before that elections are like someone saying “Do you want a punch in the face or kick in the nuts”, then as he is punching you in the face he tells you that that is what you voted for.
But perhaps there is a more specific and important point here. Who really runs the country is a gigantic wall of faceless bureaucrats, and the idea that politicians (even given the extreme limits on their claim to a mandate) have much control is just a bit of a fantasy. In a sense it is really more window dressing than anything else. To give a specific example — the theory is that, say, President Trump is head of the executive, therefore “the buck stops there”. The people in the executive branch work for him, therefore he controls them. But the experience of that selfsame president belies that fantasy. It is, for example, almost impossible to fire, demote or even reshuffle civil servants. So the control that he has is really an illusion. If you can’t fire your subordinates, you aren’t the boss.
I am not some black helicopters conspiracy nut. I am sure many people in the civil service are decent people. However, the system itself has evolved toward the sole purpose of preserving itself. It is almost darwinian in character. Nearly all the stuff we see on the news is distracting ephemera. At no stage is there any serious discussion of reducing the power of the state over our lives. So the more people there are in the civil service the worse things get, because these people empower the machine that they are part of.
Nonetheless, I agree that well written laws do require experts. It is just that it seems a fairly minor issue is the swirling miasma of deception, corruption and bad faith that is the typical western government.
Whilst American elections, in some States, continue to be rigged – the above discussion is moot.
There must be paper ballots, cast only after showing proper I.D., and counted in public.
If that does not come to pass – all other discussion is pointless.