Josh

But as Kevin Williamson writes at NRO, it’s not so much “what this administration might do with such power, but what an administration 50 years down the road might do with it.” In a seemingly endless war, the powers we cede now could be available to future presidents in perpetuity. You don’t need to wax conspiratorial to find that prospect disturbing

Not all of the representatives at the hearing demanded changes to the accounting rules. In the minority was Florida Democrat Alan Grayson, who spoke last. Essentially, Grayson wants to keep fair-value accounting intact. He wryly compared changing mark-to-market rules to what he considered other outlandish ideas. For example, it would be like changing the circumference measurement Pi from 3.14 to 4 so the crowded circular highway around Washington known as the Beltway would be expanded; or increasing the size of an inch so he could be more comfortable on a plane; or make the number 98 larger than 109, so the loss the Washington Wizards pro basketball team had just suffered at the hands of the New Orleans Hornets would be recorded as a win. “Does it make sense to kill the messenger?” he asked the panel.

Isn’t it somewhat remarkable that we can go back a few hundred years and find no shortage of quotations from our founding fathers warning us against the dangers of democracy, yet today teachers and politicians use the word as if it were an offering of gold.