This Needs Fixin'

I discussed this problem before during what was at the time the worst and most corrupt Presidency in this country’s long and distinguished history of terrible Presidencies.

But of course it’s back again.

There was a whole presidential term in there during which this could have been fixed, but I guess the Democrats were too busy not fixing evrything else to get around to it.

Systemic issues are hard, after all.

And not prosecuting the leaders of an insurrection is difficult. I doubt I could do it.

So here we are again.

The Constitution should forbid any person from holding more than one government position.

(Though doing it in federal law would cover 99% of the problem cases, since most of the job concentration is happening in jobs that are specified at levels well below the Constitution. So that’d be fine too.)

It’s better to leave some jobs empty than to give any one person (or small group of people) the breadth of control they can get by holding large numbers of powerful jobs at the same time.

After all, concentrating the control of government power increases dramatically your chances of being able to keep secrets and get away with illegal (or even just unpopular) actions.

Spreading the power around decreases the power that can be controlled by any one person.

Which can only be a good thing.

All of these jobs can be done without for a while, and most of them have deputies of one kind or another who can take over when necessary.

Government departments and even agencies can generally cope perfectly well with some number of the chief political appointee jobs being empty for a while, and the ones that couldn’t (like the NLRB) need to have that error in their designs fixed anyway.

It’s not like the executive class in government is any more important to the actual operation of their organizations than the executive class in business is to theirs.

These are not operationally important jobs.

But the are very powerful jobs.

So spread ’em around.

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