The Last Refuge Of The Elected Scoundrel

     A friend was known to ask what contemporary conservatives are determined to conserve. As Robert Conquest has noted, everyone is conservative about something – usually, the thing that provides them with their living. In that sense, all elected officials are “conservative.” Every one of them wants to remain in office. They’ll do whatever they can, use whatever measures are available to them, to retain their seats in government.

     This observation, which is surely not unique to me, is more often overlooked than any other truth about power politics. Yet it explains many things that would otherwise be thought inexplicable. Two of those things are overspending and war.

     Alexander Fraser Tytler, a.k.a. Lord Woodhouselee, declaimed on this:

     A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

     Robert A. Heinlein agreed:

     ‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader – the barbarians enter Rome.

     Overspending killed the Roman Empire and many subsequent polities. The United States is not immune. Legislators are not morons. Thus you’d naturally conclude that the awareness of the danger of prolonged, utterly unnecessary overspending would curb their voracity. But you’d be wrong:

     House Speaker Mike Johnson said on March 2 that he prefers passing a clean government funding extension to prevent a government shutdown through September before working towards including cuts recommended by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in fiscal year 2026 legislation.
     […]
     “We’re looking to pass a clean [continuing resolution] to freeze funding at current levels to make sure that the government can stay open while we begin to incorporate all these savings that we’re finding through the DOGE effort and these other sources of revenue,” Johnson during an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
     “And then for FY26, for the next fiscal year, you’re going to see a very different process and a lot more efficient and effective spending for the people.”

     Weren’t the Republicans returned to federal power specifically to stop Congress from doing this? Now that the DoGE efforts have revealed many billions of dollars in unnecessary spending, there’s absolutely no justification for it. “Prevent a government shutdown” — ? Wouldn’t that be preferable to allowing Congress to spend the U.S. into bankruptcy and destroy the dollar?

     Not to our federal legislators. Every cent of that unnecessary spending is pork. Someone’s constituents feed on it; if they lose their place at the feed-trough, he’ll lose his place on Capitol Hill. Thus, to conserve what really matters to them, they’ll persist at overspending until forcibly prevented.

     In the American Constitutional system, regular elections and a vigilant Department of Justice are supposed to provide countermeasures to the abuse of power. Both of those potential correctives have been neutered. Awareness of this helped to propel the MAGA movement and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The size of the movement swamped the barriers career legislators had erected to protect their seats in Congress. Yet the overwhelming majority of those legislators were returned to their seats even so.

     Now, with Mike Johnson’s endorsement, they’re trying to keep the overspending going just a little while longer. “We’ll fix it next fiscal year! Promise!” Even though 2025 isn’t an election year, they feel a need to keep the barrels full… and they could be right; their seats could be yanked out from under them if the DoGE cuts are enacted this year.

     President Trump might veto this “stopgap” bill. What would happen then? Would Congress override his veto in a magnificent display of “bipartisanship?” Considering the amounts of money involved and the size of the DoGE discoveries, it’s all too plausible. Time will tell, and not very much time, at that.

     But I mentioned two things politicians will do to conserve their power, didn’t I? Volodymyr Zelensky is using war with Russia to conserve his. Would American politicians ever do the same?

     Whisper it: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

     Just an early-morning thought.