Perhaps. Another viewpoint is that the checks and balances disappeared with size. The shear number of Federal employees makes oversight difficult. A rogue manager in one division of the Federal Bureaucracy could get away with a lot as long as it was done reasonably discretely. Whistle blowers are frowned upon or worse and there is no real incentive (unless the person has a strong set of moral values) to go against the establishment. Congressional oversight has been lost in the same volume problem. One could argue that whatever the Senate does is irrelevant to the House's Constitutional oversight authority. In practice, a lot of that authority is ceded via legislation to the Executive branch - who has too much to look over already. For me, DHS is a great example of the problem. It went from an almost nothing department to one of the most powerful organizations at the Federal level with little or no Congressional review. The immigration bill would grant it even further unwieldy power.RottenApple wrote:The checks and balances disappeared when Senators became elected directly by the people instead of by the states. The rational behind a House and a Senate was that the House would represent the People and the Senate would represent the States. Now, we have, in effect, 2 houses representing the People (kinda sorta but not really) and nothing protecting State's rights.chasfm11 wrote:That's been my point for the last 5 years. On this subject, it likely doesn't matter who gets elected to the POTUS job. The momentum of the Federal government is to become more and more intrusive. The politicians keep trying to divide us into the R verus D camps when we should be unifying against all of them and what they are doing.
The only thing that changes with the President is the level of corruption. Some are worse than others - both sides. It depends on how corrupt the Presidential advisors are as to the amount that they turn the various government bureaucracies into their person shills. Checks and balances to prevent that are slim and none. Most of the corruption is deliberately kept from the President for plausible deniability, weak though it may be.
I'm hard pressed to find any part of anything that comes out of D.C. that represents the will of the people. All actions represent the will of the huge lobbist organization. That is where the real power is.