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Congress Broken? Of Course: It's the Staffers
Wondering about why Congress won’t pass the SAVE Act? Is it because of those cowering senators owned by the special interests? Not quite.
John A Konrad V just straightened me out. It’s the staffers.
Members can’t read their own bills anymore. Thirty years of capped staff, frozen pay, and brain drain to K Street has left rank and file senators functionally illiterate on the legislation they vote on.
Leadership staff fill the vacuum. They are not entrenched because they are corrupt. They are entrenched because nobody else in the building can move a 1,500-page must-pass bill through conference.
…
Leaders come and go but leadership staff is entrenched.
Congress is broken because leadership staff on both sides want it to remain broken. A Congress that can only legislate through 2,000-page must-pass bill is a Congress where the staff who draft the bill run the country. Regular order is their extinction event. They will never let it come back voluntarily.
Oh? You want names? Konrad has one. She's a staffer for my own beloved Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA). Name of Nicole Teutschel.
But, a not hypothetical person is @SenatorCantwell’s USCG staffer Nicole Teutschel who is often praised by industry and has several participation trophies…
And according to several senior USCG sources, Teutschel absolutely blocked Noem’s effort to give the Coast Guard its own service secretary.
Houston We have a Problem!
OK. Now we know the problem, we can start to do something about it.
But first we have to understand that what we are really talking about is that the government is far too big and complex to be supervised by 535 senators and representatives. The answer to the problem is obvious. Government must be reduced until its functions are within the capability and the bandwidth of the legislators to understand and to manage.
Now the question that occurs to me is how to fit this into my Four Laws. The simple version would be:
Legislators cannot work because staffers.
But I'd like to make the law a little more direct and explanatory.
The other laws are simple:
Socialism cannot work because prices.
Administrative government cannot work because knowledge problem.
Regulation cannot work because regulatory capture.
Government programs cannot work because you can never reduce them.
Then we come to the new law. How about:
Legislatures cannot work because politicians need staffers.
Maybe there’s a better way to say it. In fact, in the light of my new knowledge, thanks to John A Konrad V, I’ll ask Deep Thought to work on it.
| Wed, 29 Apr 2026 02:12:23 GMT |
Eric Hoffer Was Wrong About Mass Movements
Back in The True Believer Eric Hoffer first described the arc of mass movements:
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
But he returned again and again to the topic. Here he is in “The Negro Revolution” published in The New York Times Magazine In November 1964 and reprinted in The Temper of Our Time.
Up to now America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
But then in “The Madhouse of Change” published in Playboy magazine in December 1968 and republished in First Things, Last Things, he says, in respect of America’s blacks:
Can mass movements do ought for the Negro? The answer is no. America is hard on mass movements. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a corporation or a racket. The Black Muslim movement is on the way to becoming a holding company of stores, farms and banks, while the civil-rights movement is largely an instrument in the hands of the Negro middle class to force its way into the privileged enclaves of American life. Used thus, the Negro revolution is not a movement but a racket.
All this is great stuff. But I think that Eric Hoffer is missing the point. And that is why I wrote in the aftermath of my AT piece on the SPLC affair a challenge teoo his maxim.. I wrote:
Every political racket disguises itself for a season as a great cause fighting for justice.
I bet that if Eric Hoffer were alive today he would chuckle at that. And if I got to speak to his ghost I would say to him: “boy, oh boy, did you nail it on mass movements!”
Oh, I don’t doubt that every leader and follower in every political movement that was ever more than the gleam in the eye of an intellectual utterly believed in their sacred quest that would save the world.
But you and I have good reason not to buy into the ravings of lunatics, particularly in the light of the numerous social-science experiments conducted in the 19th and 20th centuries to determine how politics really worked in practice.
I’d say the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Whatever the revolutionaries thought they were doing, the regime they implemented universally rewarded the leaders and supporters with loot plundered from everyone from manual workers to billionaires. In other words, the regime was indistinguishable from a criminal gang. And what do criminal gangs do? They operate rackets.
Let us ask a question:
What is the difference between a criminal racket and a political racket?
The political racket gets to use the army and/or police as enforcers.
Or maybe not quite. I asked Grok: “what is a criminal racket.” The reply:
A criminal racket is a systematic, ongoing illegal scheme designed to generate profit through fraud, extortion, coercion, or other unlawful means.
So let’s ask the question again:
What is the difference between a criminal racket and a political racket?
The political racket is enforced by the power of law.
Although, as we have recently learned, our beloved ruling class often does not even bother to operate its rackets in accordance with the law, but never gets prosecuted by the criminal justice system when it violates the law.
Just to be fair, I decided to ask Grok “what is a political racket?” Grok replied with an extremely sophisticated analysis ending thus:
In short, calling something a political racket accuses it of functioning like organized crime: not random corruption, but a structured, profitable enterprise that exploits its position of power.
Ain’t that the truth.
| Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:18:31 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The field of perception is the distinction between reality and fantasy
When government bureaucrats deploy Critical Theory it isn’t Critical Theory.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Analysis of Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation
