BrianGarst.com

The latest political scandal, the so-called Bridge-gate, to consume the media involves revelations that a top aid to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie deliberately jammed traffic in the district of a mayor who refused to endorse Christie’s reelection. It’s nice that the media is obsessed with something – abuse of political power- that actually matters for once, though I can’t help but wonder where they were when the National Park Service was using the government shutdown as an excuse to harass citizens for the purpose of scoring political points  for the administration against Congress. And it’s worth noting that there’s already been 17 times more coverage on the big three networks for Christie’s scandal than there has been in the last six months for the IRS, a major instance of political abuse that has yet to be fully resolved.

It’s unclear at this point whether Christie ordered or knew of his staffer’s actions, but that’s a political question that will sort itself out. I’m more interested in the policy implications.

As political payback goes Bridge-gate is rather weak sauce. David Boaz notes that it pails in comparison to the more open and direct abuses of Progressive hero FDR:

FDR knew the rule, “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” He wasn’t so squeamish when it came to retailers who defied his preferences. Sewell Avery, chairman of the big catalog company Montgomery Ward, opposed labor unions, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Roosevelt’s re-election. In 1944 Avery refused FDR’s order to extend his company’s labor contracts to avoid a strike. Roosevelt ordered the War Department to seize the offices of Montgomery Ward. Attorney General Francis Biddle flew to Chicago to oversee the army’s physical removal of Avery from his office, as the photo shows.

FDR was in fact a godfather of sorts when it comes to the abuse of political power. Aside from being wasteful and ineffective, the massive spending and public works programs he established during the Great Depression were routinely used to reward political allies and punish opponents. He hardly invented the practice of political patronage, but he drastically increased its scale and impact.

We’ve since witnessed numerous other examples of political abuse, from Richard Nixon to J. Edgar Hoover. Each case demonstrated in its own way the dangers of concentrating too much political power in a single person.  Indeed, the only sure fire way to reduce the abuse of power is to reduce the amount of power itself. The less power any one individual or group is able to wield, the fewer cases of abuse we will witness. And the key to reducing political power is to reduce the size and scope of government itself.

political philosophy