Let Me Repeat Myself...

(...on a different topic.)

Remember this post?

It's the only power Congress really has. They're not going to give it up, short of being at gunpoint.

Instapundit links to an Opinion Journal piece on the Republican's failure to live up to their purported principles. Excerpts:

If Republicans lose control of Congress in November, they might want to look back at last Thursday as the day it was lost. That's when the big spenders among House Republicans blew up a deal between the leadership and rank-in-file to impose some modest spending discipline.

Unlike the collapse of the immigration bill, this fiasco can't be blamed on Senate Democrats. This one is all about Republicans and their refusal to give up their power to spend money at will and pass out "earmarks" like a bartender offering drinks on the house.

--

Jeff Flake of Arizona wanted each spending "earmark" to be identified along with the Member who requested it, so perhaps lawmakers might be shamed into using tax dollars more responsibly. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that a legislative body that has allowed these pork projects to quadruple in the past five years is still capable of being embarrassed.

I repeat myself: No reform unless it's at the Point. Of. A. Gun.

Which means, no reform.

Ah, politics. And it's been this way literally for decades. Just ask Henry Louis Mencken or Will Rogers.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. - Will Rogers

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. - Will Rogers

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. - H.L. Mencken

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him. - H.L. Mencken

And, finally:

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone—one which barely escapes being no government at all. This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have passed from these scenes and taken up my public duties in Hell. - H.L. Mencken

I'm afraid his timeline might have been a little optimistic.