I wrote sometime back that we had reached a point with this administration that we were entirely dependent upon the integrity of a few members of the legal community to save the country. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but I think it may literally be true.

I'm not usually a big friend of tough prosecutors. I hate the drug war and I think they play fast and loose when trying to take down a target by squeezing people who are only peripherally involved. There is always tension between civil libertarians and the government and that is as it should be. It's that balance that allows us to live in a (mostly) civilized society.

When a government becomes corrupt and power mad one normally depends upon the political opposition and the press to sound the alarm --- and to some extent that has happened. But due to a corporate media that pumps non-stop sensation into people's heads 24 hours a day, the signal to noise ratio is seriously out of whack, even when something very important happens. Only terrorist attacks and catastrophic natural disasters can break through the static. As Peter Daou writes today, the sheer number of scandals makes it almost impossible for the press and the public to see any of them clearly.

And even if something begins to break through, we know from the Plame scandal and others that the administration exerts an iron grip on the media almost as painful as the one with which it chokes dissenters in its own party. After all, when Scooter Libby called Tim Russert to complain about Chris Matthews' coverage, bureau chief Russert didn't simply say that Matthews had a right to his opinion or that NBC always provided a forum for the administration to rebut any claims and leave it at that. No, he reported Libby's complaints to the president of NBC, Matthews' bosses. I think that pretty much tells the tale of the Washington press corps in a nutshell. I wouldn't count on them to help us out of this mess.

In addition, our two party tradition provides for very little real power to be invested in an oppostion party on its own --- the rules have been devised for bipartisan compromise. When you have a very disciplined majority (even if only with a slight numerical advantage) the minority party can be virtually shut out of government, as in a parliamentary system. We have little experience with this kind of government and without the open floor debate and partisan press that exists in other systems, this makes for very lopsided power structure.

The structural political imbalance, the media cacophany and the overwhelming numbers of crises and scandals both large and small have virtually paralyzed this country's ability to deal with the very serious constitutional crisis that is developing over the president's assertion of unlimited executive and warmaking powers. I think the law is our only backstop on this. It's appearing more and more that we are going to have to ask certain lawyers, cops and judges who understand that their duty to their country is bigger than their duty to this president to step up.

As I said, read the whole thing here.

In a sense, we're suffering through one of the ramifications of the Founders not anticipating the rise of political parties, and failing to make allowances for them in our system, for their choosing not to go with a Parliamentary system (in which the Head of Government is an integral part of the Legislature), and for their choice to combine the roles of Head of State with Head of Government in the person of the President. They counted on the natural tensions which should obtain between the Executive and the Legislature to provide a check on the power of both, but failed to conceive of the type of modern political party which could hold strict control of both parts of the government, thereby eliminating (for the most part) that tension and erasing their value to block abuses by the other.

And when the Press, another institution not quite anticipated by the Founders (except in the afterthought of the First Amendment), is neutered, as ours is currently, another check from outside the government is eliminated as well, opening things up (or closing them down, depending on your point of view) even more.

Since Congress is a multi-headed creature (even when strictly controlled by one party), and the President stands alone, it was almost inevitable that he would accumulate more power over time, which means that when checks are eliminated, it's the President who is the most likely to abuse his power in ways that are damaging to the national polity. (Congress instead plays out its lack of a checking influence through rampant personal and institutional corruption, which we're also seeing.)