"I am not an ideologue," protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society -- health care, education and energy.

Bottom of Form

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address

(a) pledging not to walk away from health care reform,

(b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and

(c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a "jobs bill."

This being a democracy, don't the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don't they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms:

(1) The people are stupid and

(2) Republicans are bad.

Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking "in the plain words of plain folks," because the people are "suspicious of complexity."

Counseled Blow: "The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, 'Mr. President, we're down here.'"

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are "a nation of dodos" that is "too dumb to thrive."

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself "for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people." The subject, he noted, was "complex."

The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people's anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit:

Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good.

A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick's masterwork, "Anarchy, State, and Utopia," "proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification."

The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda -- which couldn't get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is "one of the truest expressions of patriotism."

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice.

"They made a decision," explained David Axelrod, "they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed"

-- a perfect expression of liberals' conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country's, that their idea of the public good is the public's, that their failure is therefore the nation's.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that "the peasants are revolting" is a pun.

For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism.

No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back.

It re-centers.

It renormalizes.

Even in Massachusetts.

Federal Court: No, the Government May Not Prevent Further Discovery of the Takeover of AIG

This week we broke the story of possible criminal wrongdoing in the government takeover of insurance giant AIG. In the last several months, the US government has tried, unsuccessfully, to throw out plaintiff Kevin Murray's case, alleging that the government's takeover of AIG puts it in the position of supporting and promoting Islam and Shariah finance.

In the discovery process attorneys for Murray, David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise (of the Thomas More Law Center), discovered that the takeover itself may have been illegal, and have attempted to get Treasury Secretary under oath to try and untangle this mess.

Again, the Fed and the Treasury Department tried to stonewall.

This past Tuesday, Federal district court judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff rejected the Treasury Department's and the Fed's effort to prevent any further discovery while the government attempts to convince the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Zatkoff's earlier ruling rejecting the government's motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit challenging the government's takeover of AIG on First Amendment-Establishment Clause grounds.

The "extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary"

The lawsuit, captioned Murray v. Geithner et al., was brought by attorneys David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, representing the plaintiff, Kevin Murray, a tax payer and former combat Marine who served in Iraq.

The federal lawsuit alleges that the U.S. government's takeover and financial bailout of AIG was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Specifically, at the time of the government bailout (September-December 2008), AIG was (and still is) the world leader in promoting Shariah-compliant insurance products.

Shariah is Islamic law, and it is the identical legal doctrine that demands capital punishment for apostasy and blasphemy and provides the legal and political mandates for global jihad followed religiously by the world's Muslim terrorists.

By propping up AIG with tax payer funds, the U.S. government is directly and indirectly promoting Islam and, more troubling, Shariah.

After the court rejected the government's motion to dismiss the case and granted Plaintiff's attorneys until May 2010 to conduct discovery into the AIG takeover, the government filed a motion asking Judge Zatkoff to certify the case for immediate appeal of his denial of the motion and to stay all further discovery.

Today the government got its answer: No and no.

In what is an extremely well-written opinion, Judge Zatkoff scolded the government lawyers for filing the wrong motion at the wrong time and then proceeded to tell them they would have lost in any event because his earlier denial of the motion to dismiss was proper and well-considered.

The Court's recent decision is especially timely and critical for Plaintiff Kevin Murray because his attorneys had previously filed a motion to compel Secretary Timothy Geithner to sit for a three-hour deposition.

The basis for the "extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary" arose because Plaintiff's counsel had earlier deposed the witnesses provided by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board and the government witnesses either testified inaccurately or feigned ignorance.

The only one with all the answers turns out to be Secretary Geithner.

While forcing high government officials to sit for a deposition in civil litigation is extraordinary, federal rules allow a court to take this step when the government official has personal knowledge of a relevant element of the litigation and where the moving party has no reasonable alternative.

In this case, attorneys Yerushalmi and Muise argued in their court papers that this exception fits their circumstances in spades.

"The witness designated by the government to testify on behalf of the Fed was less than forthright in his sworn testimony," Plaintiff's counsel Robert Muise of the Thomas More Law Center explained. "To his credit, he admitted he had prepared for his deposition by reading media reports and not actually reviewing the relevant documents.

That might suggest that his lack of candor was willful blindness."

David Yerushalmi, who is co-counsel with Robert Muise, laid out the grounds for the motion:

At the time of the takeover decision, Secretary Geithner was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and he was the leading advocate of the AIG takeover. Moreover, he designed how the U.S. government would not only bail out AIG with tax payer dollars, but how the government would illegally take control of 80% of the voting shares through what was patently an illegal and invalid trust arrangement. It is apparent from the discovery we've conducted to date that this was done purposefully and with an intent to conceal the illegal takeover with a fraudulent trust.

Attorneys Yerushalmi and Muise want to ask Secretary Geithner:

Why he forced AIG to take on so much debt that AIG's credit rating, already in peril, was sure to collapse without yet additional government funds, essentially guaranteeing AIG would remain a ward of the state?

Why he imposed such Draconian terms on AIG that there was no way it could survive without additional billions from U.S. tax payers?

Why he then used AIG to secretly funnel 100% payoffs to AIG's counterparties, including his colleagues and friends at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and the European giant, Société Générale.

In other words, why did Geithner decide to destroy AIG's chances of survival as a private entity while surreptitiously saving and preserving private ownership of other domestic and foreign financial companies? And,

Why he took control of 80% of AIG's voting shares without legal authority to do so and used a fraudulent trust arrangement to conceal the illegal takeover? Breaking News: The court just today granted plaintiff Murray's motion for leave to amend the complaint to include yet additional TARP funds provided to AIG after the filing of the complaint. While the court did not allow the plaintiff to add AIG as a defendant as he had also requested, Murray's attorneys tell us that they had accomplished enough discovery to know where to look for the skeletons in AIG's closet in any event.

Transformational Leadership or Constitutional Statesmanship?

Lots of politicians make promises they can't keep. Statesmen, by contrast, promise less and deliver more.

Knowing their own limitations and those of the people they serve, they act according to principles, not just promises.

As a presidential candidate Barack Obama promised the American people nothing less than a new nation. ". . . We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," he said just before he was elected president in November 2008.

Since his victory the president has made very clear his reverence for the idea of transformational leadership.

He has identified "transformative moments" that must be seized, lauded "leaders who are able to bring about transformative change," and heralded his administration's steps towards "a transformation of how government works."

The president's efforts to make his idea of "transformational leadership" real are everywhere.

Whether in massive bailouts, sweeping health care reform legislation, an attempt to overhaul the student loan system, or a proposed revamping of financial regulations, the president has sought a transformation of huge swaths of American life with little regard to the constitutionality of these efforts.

Mr. Obama has done all of this while at the same time linking his idea of transformation to the sixteenth American president.

Asked in July 2009 who his heroes are, President Obama singled out Abraham Lincoln for the highest praise.

The president's admiration both of Lincoln and the idea of transformational leadership is perplexing, because for Lincoln the idea of "transformational leadership" was not just foreign, but something he had to fight.

Lincoln's fundamental cause was not changing the American political form, or regime, but preserving it.

The American regime was one of rights, Lincoln held, and slavery struck at the heart of the American regime.

The Confederacy was a regime not built upon universal rights of equality and liberty but rather a dangerous act of rebellion. Its form of government was illegitimate.

Three years before the Confederacy's birth, in 1858, Mr. Lincoln was locked in political battle to unseat the "Little Giant," Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas.

In a July 1858 debate with Douglas, in Chicago, Mr. Lincoln assailed the mighty incumbent for three erroneous positions, including

Douglas's denial of the truth of the Declaration of Independence;

his support of the Supreme Court's Dred Scottdecision, which made slaves no better than animals; and

his advancement of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which said that each state should have the right to decide whether it would allow slavery or not.

"Now I ask you in all soberness," Lincoln said, "if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form."

For Lincoln, Douglas represented a kind of transformational leadership, one in which his ideology would trump the truths of the Declaration and the Constitution.

In the over two million words Lincoln spoke or wrote it seems that he used the word "transform" only that one time in the 1858 debate with Douglas.

Transformation talk today is commonplace, especially in an age in which many universities offer courses in "transformational leadership."

Introduced in 1978 by presidential scholar James MacGregor Burns, the idea of "transformational leadership" gained common currency as management consultants and motivational gurus seized upon it as fodder for their books.

Contrasting various modes of leadership, Burns and his followers emphasize that the "transformational" leader is followed by others because of his personality and ability to effect change. In short, the "transformational leader" has the "vision thing."

Lincoln sought the preservation of America, not its transformation. Rather than envisioning a new future, he appealed to the old moral, political, and social truths of liberty and equality.

These were true not by dint of his personality, but because they are universal and reasonable. Lincoln was the servant of enduring constitutional principles so that he could end slavery and preserve the Union.

America today needs not "transformational leadership," but constitutional statesmanship.

Compared to the idea of "transformational leadership," the idea of constitutional statesmanship now seems out of place, like shouting "Give me liberty or give me death!" in a movie theater.

Yet given the choice of further attempts at the unconstitutional transformation of the country, or seeking to be a statesman much better attuned to the Constitution, the president in his second year in office might better heed the example of his hero Lincoln.

For Lincoln, the Constitution was inviolable. He knew that the presidential oath he took to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution defined his responsibility.

More than any other promise a president makes it matters most.

DHS: Fossil Fuels and Climate Change are 'National Threats'

On February 1, Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security released a 108-page report to Congress, the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Report.

Subtitled "A Strategic Framework for a Secure Homeland", a quick glance at the report left me questioning whether the DHS is more serious about Homeland Security than they are about advancing Obama Administration policy goals.

The following item is in a bullet list of threats to America's national interests (p. 7):

· Dependence on fossil fuels and the threat of global climate change that can open the United States to disruptions and manipulations in energy supplies and to changes in our natural environment on an unprecedented scale.

Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of weather-related hazards, which could, in turn, result in social and political destabilization, international conflict, or mass migrations.

If there's a Smithsonian exhibit on Muddled Thinking and Bureaucratic Gobbledegook, that paragraph belongs in it.

"Dependence on fossil fuels ... can open the United States to disruptions and manipulations in energy supplies..." Ms. Napolitano, it is not our dependence on fossil fuels that is the problem, it is our dependence on foreign sources of crude oil and the Administration's determination to exacerbate the problem by limiting domestic access and punishing small domestic producers.

While America probably will never be self-sufficient in energy, we could be a lot less dependent of foreign sources of crude if we 1) explored more domestically, and 2) relied more on natural gas.

If, as you say, disruptions and manipulation of crude oil supply threaten our national interest, then it's time to start doing something about that threat.

Even under the most optimistic assumptions for growth of wind and solar energy, we'll be using more oil, gas and coal thirty years from now than we use today.

Then there's Climate Change. No need here to belabor the myriad scandals, conflicts of interest and lapses of judgment that have plagued the Climate Change community of late.

"Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of weather-related hazards..."

We've all become conditioned to this blather to the point where we hardly notice. We have, after all, experienced a "hockey stick", haven't we, along with an increasing trend in hurricanes and tornadoes?

Hmmm. Not much of a trend there. This graph just considers landfalling hurricanes. Maybe if we look at total hurricanes, landfalling or not, in more detail:

This graph doesn't include 2009 (which I blogged about here), a rather puny year for storms, even counting a late November storm and an extratropical storm in the North Atlantic that really shouldn't have counted in the statistics.

OK, there must be a trend in tornadoes:

Hmmm, again. There's a trend, alright, but it seems like it's going the wrong way.

Ms. Napolitano, it seems as though your party has a bad habit of taking a government agency with a worthwhile goal (in this case, the critical goal of Homeland Security), and confusing the mission with a mishmash of other incidental policy issues and distractions.

· Our use of fossil fuels does not threaten our security.

· There is no evidence of an increasing trend in the number or severity of storms.

· ManBearPig is not going to kill us all in our beds.

Now, please get back to the serious business of securing our borders and keeping out the bad guys who would do our country real harm.

Obama's Big Tax Hike on Multinationals Means Fewer American Jobs and Reduced U.S. Competitiveness

The new budget from the White House contains all sorts of land mines for taxpayers, which is not surprising considering the President wants to extract another $1.3 trillion over the next ten years.

One of the worst proposals targets American companies that compete in foreign markets. Under current law, the "foreign-source" income of multinationals is subject to tax by the IRS even though it already is subject to all applicable tax where it is earned (just as the IRS taxes foreign companies on income they earn in America).

But at least companies have the ability to sometimes delay when this double taxation occurs, thanks to a policy known as deferral.

The White House thinks that this income should be taxed right away, though, claiming that "...deferring U.S. tax on the income from the investment may cause U.S. businesses to shift their investments and jobs overseas, harming our domestic economy."

In reality, deferral protects American companies from being put at a competitive disadvantage when competing with companies from other nations, and therefore protects American jobs.

The American Enterprise Institute just held a conference last month on deferral and related international tax issues. Featuring experts from all viewpoints, there was very little consensus.

But almost every participant agreed that higher taxes on multinationals will lead to an exodus of companies, investment, and jobs from America. Obama's proposal is good news for China, but bad news for America.

How to Get Our Democracy Back: If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress

We should remember what it felt like one year ago, as the ability to recall it emotionally will pass and it is an emotional memory as much as anything else.

It was a moment rare in a democracy's history. The feeling was palpable-to supporters and opponents alike-that something important had happened.

America had elected, the young candidate promised, a transformational president. And wrapped in a campaign that had produced the biggest influx of new voters and small-dollar contributions in a generation, the claim seemed credible, almost intoxicating, and just in time.

Yet a year into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is already clear that this administration is an opportunity missed. Not because it is too conservative. Not because it is too liberal. But because it is too conventional.

Obama has given up the rhetoric of his early campaign-a campaign that promised to "challenge the broken system in Washington" and to "fundamentally change the way Washington works." Indeed, "fundamental change" is no longer even a hint.

Instead, we are now seeing the consequences of a decision made at the most vulnerable point of Obama's campaign-just when it seemed that he might really have beaten the party's presumed nominee.

For at that moment, Obama handed the architecture of his new administration over to a team that thought what America needed most was another Bill Clinton. A team chosen by the brother of one of DC's most powerful lobbyists, and a White House headed by the quintessential DC politician. A team that could envision nothing more than the ordinary politics of Washington-the kind of politics Obama had called "small."

A team whose imagination-politically-is tiny.

These tiny minds-brilliant though they may be in the conventional game of DC-have given up what distinguished Obama's extraordinary campaign.

Not the promise of healthcare reform or global warming legislation-Hillary Clinton had embraced both of those ideas, and every other substantive proposal that Obama advanced.

Instead, the passion that Obama inspired grew from the recognition that something fundamental had gone wrong in the way our government functions, and his commitment to reform it.

For Obama once spoke for the anger that has now boiled over in even the blue state Massachusetts-that our government is corrupt; that fundamental change is needed.

As he told us, both parties had allowed "lobbyists and campaign contributions to rig the system." And "unless we're willing to challenge [that] broken system...nothing else is going to change."

"The reason" Obama said he was "running for president [was] to challenge that system." For "if we're not willing to take up that fight, then real change-change that will make a lasting difference in the lives of ordinary Americans-will keep getting blocked by the defenders of the status quo."

This administration has not "taken up that fight." Instead, it has stepped down from the high ground the president occupied on January 20, 2009, and played a political game no different from the one George W. Bush played, or Bill Clinton before him.

Obama has accepted the power of the "defenders of the status quo" and simply negotiated with them. "Audacity" fits nothing on the list of last year's activity, save the suggestion that this is the administration the candidate had promised.

Maybe this was his plan all along. It was not what he said. And by ignoring what he promised, and by doing what he attacked ("too many times, after the election is over, and the confetti is swept away, all those promises fade from memory, and the lobbyists and the special interests move in"), Obama will leave the presidency, whether in 2013 or 2017, with Washington essentially intact and the movement he inspired betrayed.

That movement needs new leadership. On the right (the tea party) and the left (MoveOn and Bold Progressives), there is an unstoppable recognition that our government has failed. But both sides need to understand the source of its failure if either or, better, both together, are to respond.

At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt.

Consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed-slowly, and then all at once. Today it is at a record low. Just 45 percent of Americans have "trust and confidence" in Congress; just 25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job.

A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today.

We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity.

And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress.

And it answers-as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered-not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.

This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy.

The democracy is feigned.

A feigned democracy breeds cynicism.

Cynicism leads to disengagement.

Disengagement leaves the fox guarding the henhouse.

This corruption is not hidden. On the contrary, it is in plain sight, with its practices simply more and more brazen.

The list is endless; the practice open and notorious. Since the time of Rome, historians have taught that while corruption is a part of every society, the only truly dangerous corruption comes when the society has lost any sense of shame. Washington has lost its sense of shame.

As fundraising becomes the focus of Congress-as the parties force members to raise money for other members, as they reward the best fundraisers with lucrative committee assignments and leadership positions-the focus of Congressional "work" shifts.

Like addicts constantly on the lookout for their next fix, members grow impatient with anything that doesn't promise the kick of a campaign contribution.

The first job is meeting the fundraising target. Everything else seems cheap. Talk about policy becomes, as one Silicon Valley executive described it to me, "transactional."

Money has been part of American politics forever, on occasion-in the Gilded Age or the Harding administration, for example-much more blatantly than recently."

But "in recent decades 'the scale of it has just gotten way out of hand.' The money may have come in brown paper bags in earlier eras, but the politicians needed, and took, much less of it than they take through more formal channels today."

According to the 2000 Census, fourteen of the hundred richest counties were in the Washington area. In 2007, nine of the richest twenty were in the area.

Again, Kaiser: "In earlier generations enterprising young men came to Washington looking for power and political adventure, often with ambitions to save or reform the country or the world.

In the last fourth of the twentieth century such aspirations were supplanted by another familiar American yearning: to get rich.

Members of Congress are insulted by charges like these. They insist that money has no such effect. Perhaps, they concede, it buys access.

(As former Representative Romano Mazzoli put it, "People who contribute get the ear of the member and the ear of the staff. They have the access-and access is it.")

But there are two independent and adequate responses to this weak rationalization for the corruption of the Fundraising Congress.

Why waste your time engaging politically when it is ultimately money that buys results, at least if you're not one of those few souls with vast sums of it?

The money is benign.

It supports the positions members have already taken. It is simply how those positions find voice and support. It is just the American way."

Or the inability of the twenty years of "small government" Republican presidents in the past twenty-nine to reduce the size of government at all. Or... you fill in the blank.

From the perspective of what the People want, or even the perspective of what the political parties say they want, the Fundraising Congress is misfiring in every dimension.

That is either because Congress is filled with idiots or because Congress has a dependency on something other than principle or public policy sense. In my view, Congress is not filled with idiots.

The point is simple, if extraordinarily difficult for those of us proud of our traditions to accept: this democracy no longer works. Its central player has been captured. Corrupted. Controlled by an economy of influence disconnected from the democracy.

In a single line: there will be no change until we change Congress.

That Congress is the core of the problem with American democracy today is a point increasingly agreed upon by a wide range of the commentators.

But almost universally, these commentators obscure the source of the problem.

Some see our troubles as tied to the arcane rules of the institution, particularly the Senate. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, for example, has tied the failings of Congress to the filibuster and argues that the first step of fundamental reform has got to be to fix that.

Tom Geoghegan made a related argument in The Nation magazine in August, and the argument appears again in the current issue alongside this article. (

Of course, the editors were less eager to abolish the filibuster when the idea was floated by the Republicans in 2005, but put that aside.)

These arguments, however, miss a basic point. Filibuster rules simply set the price that interests must pay to dislodge reform. If the rules were different, the price would no doubt be higher. But a higher price wouldn't change the economy of influence.

Indeed, as political scientists have long puzzled, special interests underinvest in Washington relative to the potential return. These interests could just as well afford to assure that fifty-one senators block reform as forty.

Others see the problem as tied to lobbyists-as if removing lobbyists from the mix of legislating (as if that constitutionally could be done) would be reform enough to assure that legislation was not corrupted.

But the problem in Washington is not lobbying. The problem is the role that lobbyists have come to play. As John Edwards used to say (when we used to quote what Edwards said), there's all the difference in the world between a lawyer making an argument to a jury and a lawyer handing out $100 bills to the jurors.

That line is lost on the profession today. The profession would earn enormous credibility if it worked to restore it.

Finally, some believe the problem of Congress is tied to excessive partisanship. Members from an earlier era routinely point to the loss of a certain civility and common purpose. The game as played by both parties seems more about the parties than about the common good.

Everyone inside this game recognizes that if the public saw too clearly that the driving force in Washington is campaign cash, the public might actually do something to change that.

Each of these causes is a symptom of a more fundamental disease. That disease is improper dependency. Remove the dependency, and these symptoms become-if not perfectly then at least much more-benign.

As someone who has known Obama vaguely for almost twenty years-he was my colleague at the University of Chicago, and I supported and contributed to every one of his campaigns-I would have bet my career that he understood this.

Yet a year into this administration, it is impossible to believe this kind of change is anywhere on the administration's radar, at least anymore. The need to reform Congress has left Obama's rhetoric.

The race to dicker with Congress in the same way Congress always deals is now the plan. Symbolic limits on lobbyists within the administration and calls for new disclosure limits for Congress are the sole tickets of "reform." (Even its revolving-door policy left a Mack truck-wide gap at its core: members of the administration can't leave the government and lobby for the industries they regulated during the term of the administration.

But the day after Obama leaves office? All bets are off.) Save a vague promise in his State of the Union about overturning the Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (as if that were reform enough), there is nothing in the current framework of the White House's plans that is anything more than the strategy of a kinder and gentler, albeit certainly more articulate, George W. Bush: buying reform at whatever price the Fundraising Congress demands.

No doubt Obama will try to buy more reform than Bush did. But the terms will continue to be set by a Congress driven by a dependency that betrays democracy, and at a price that is not clear we can even afford.

"People...watch," Obama told us in the campaign, "as every year, candidates offer up detailed healthcare plans with great fanfare and promise, only to see them crushed under the weight of Washington politics and drug and insurance industry lobbying once the campaign is over."

"This cannot," he said, "be one of those years."

It has been one of those years. And it will continue to be so long as presidents continue to give a free pass to the underlying corruption of our democracy: Congress.

Nor can one exaggerate the need for precisely this reform. We can't just putter along anymore. Our government is, as Paul Krugman put it, "ominously dysfunctional" just at a time when the world desperately needs at least competence.

We are at one of those rare but critical moments when a nation must remake itself, to restore its government to its high ideals and to the potential of its people.

What would the reform the Congress needs be? At its core, a change that restores institutional integrity. A change that rekindles a reason for America to believe in the central institution of its democracy by removing the dependency that now defines the Fundraising Congress.

Two changes would make that removal complete. Achieving just one would have made Obama the most important president in a hundred years.

That one-and first-would be to enact an idea proposed by a Republican (Teddy Roosevelt) a century ago: citizen-funded elections.

America won't believe in Congress, and Congress won't deliver on reform, whether from the right or the left, until Congress is no longer dependent upon conservative-with-a-small-c interests-meaning those in the hire of the status quo, keen to protect the status quo against change.

So long as the norms support a system in which members sell out for the purpose of raising funds to get re-elected, citizens will continue to believe that money buys results in Congress. So long as citizens believe that, it will.

Citizen-funded elections could come in a number of forms. The most likely is the current bill sponsored in the House by Democrat John Larson and Republican Walter Jones, in the Senate by Democrats Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter.

That bill is a hybrid between traditional public funding and small-dollar donations. Under this Fair Elections Now Act (which, by the way, is just about the dumbest moniker for the statute possible, at least if the sponsors hope to avoid Supreme Court invalidation), candidates could opt in to a system that would give them, after clearing certain hurdles, substantial resources to run a campaign.

Candidates would also be free to raise as much money as they want in contributions maxed at $100 per citizen.

The only certain effect of this first change would be to make it difficult to believe that money buys any results in Congress.

A second change would make that belief impossible: banning any member of Congress from working in any lobbying or consulting capacity in Washington for seven years after his or her term.

K Street will lose interest after seven years, and fewer in Congress would think of their career the way my law students think about life after law school-six to eight years making around $180,000, and then doubling or tripling that as a partner, where "partnership" for members of Congress means a comfortable position on K Street.

And while it would take an enormous leap to rewrite constitutional law to make the Fair Elections Now Act unconstitutional, Citizens United demonstrates that the Court is in a jumping mood.

This fact has led some, including now me, to believe that reform needs people who can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Without doubt, we need to push the Fair Elections Now Act. But we also need to begin the process to change the Constitution to assure that reform can survive the Roberts Court.

That constitutional change should focus on the core underlying problem:institutional independence.

The economy of influence that grips Washington has destroyed Congress's independence. Congress needs the power to restore it, by both funding elections to secure independence and protecting the context within which elections occur so that the public sees that integrity.

No amendment would come from this Congress, of course. But the framers left open a path to amendment that doesn't require the approval of Congress-a convention, which must be convened if two-thirds of the states apply for it.

The only requirement is that two-thirds apply, and then begins the drama of an unscripted national convention to debate questions of fundamental law.

Many fear a convention, worrying that our democracy can't process constitutional innovation well. I don't share that fear, but in any case, any proposed amendment still needs thirty-eight states to ratify it.

There are easily twelve solid blue states in America and twelve solid red states. No one should fear that change would be too easy.

No doubt constitutional amendments are politically impossible-just as wresting a republic from the grip of a monarchy, or abolishing slavery or segregation, or electing Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama was "politically impossible."

But conventional minds are always wrong about pivot moments in a nation's history. Obama promised this was such a moment. The past year may prove that he let it slip from his hand.

For this, democracy pivots. It will either spin to restore integrity or it will spin further out of control. Whether it will is no longer a choice.

Our only choice is how.

What all sides must come to see is that the reform of neither is possible until we solve our first problem first-the dependency of the Fundraising Congress.