After America - Mark Steyn [38]
But there’s a more basic objection: Conyers is correct. He doesn’t need to read the bill because he is no longer a maker of law. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is two thousand pages, there’s no equality: instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege. One state is treated differently from another, out of raw political necessity. For ObamaCare, Nebraska got a “Cornhusker Kickback,” but there was no “Granite State Graft” for New Hampshire, because there was no political need for one. Some citizens (i.e., members of powerful unions and approved identity groups) are treated differently from other citizens (i.e., you). It’s not a law so much as a Forbes 500 List, a hit parade of who’s most plugged in to who matters in Washington, with Nebraska senators and UAW honchos at the top, and a loser like you way down at the bottom. And even then, as happened almost as soon as ObamaCare had passed, the un-level playing field had to be re-landscaped with additional hillocks and valleys containing opt-outs for McDonald’s, the United Federation of Teachers, and anyone else powerful enough to get past the Obama switchboard operator.75 So Conyers has to worry only that his client groups have been taken care of: he doesn’t deal in average American citizens, as Charlie Rangel would say. Joe Average and all the rest can be left to the agency of this, the board of that, the commission of the other, manned by millions of bureaucrats whose role is to determine, arbitrarily but authoritatively, which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-the-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into.
The lifetime professional legislative class boasts of its “experience.” Experience of what? Of spending beyond not their means but ours. The Emirs of Incumbistan have presided over an explosion of government, an avalanche of debt, and the looting of America’s future. Robert C. Byrd named buildings after himself; Eddie Bernice Johnson handed out a third of Congressional Black Caucus college scholarships to her own grandchildren and the family of her senior aide;76 Charlie Rangel fiddled his expenses while Rome burned through our money. Focused on their petty privileges, they were happy to sub-contract law-making to others. The Emirs corrupted not just themselves but the very idea of responsible government. And far from the ballot box, alternative sources of power arose.
THE BUREAU OF COMPLIANCE
Behind our left-wing legislators are lefter judges. In a country where every other institution has lost legitimacy, only our robed rulers still command widespread deference. So these days the left advances its causes more effectively through the courts than through elections, for the fairly obvious reason that very few people are dumb enough to vote for this stuff. The judiciary legislates fundamental issues—abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, health care—and thereby supplies electoral cover for Democrats. As Nancy Pelosi explained, “It is a decision of the Supreme Court. So this is almost as if God has spoken.”77 So that’s that. Love to help you, says Nancy, take your point, but there’s nothing I can do.
That’s not how Abraham Lincoln saw it: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”78
Which they have.
America is unique in this regard. In Europe, if the establishment wants to invent a new “right”—that is, yet another intrusion by government—it goes ahead and does so. If it happens to conflict with this year’s constitution, they rewrite it. But the United States is the only western nation in which the rulers invoke