How government becomes corrupt

If you’d like a lesson in how government becomes corrupt, you don’t need to take a trip to Louisiana for an up-close view of state politics, or comb over history books for a primer on the Sons of St. Tammany that controlled New York City patronage in 1850s, you need only to examine what’s going on between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

What Sen. Reid is doing here — and I suspect he is doing similar things at the Bureau of Land Management and other federal entities useful to him and his patronage friends — is how government devolves into a system of whim and unfairness based not on the rule of law, but upon who you know.

Take a quick look at this piece in the Wall Street Journal on the confirmation of Norman Bay to head FERC. Get a load of the quotes from Sen. Reid. And be afraid.

This is how trust in government erodes.