THERE'S MORE TO GOOD GOVERNANCE THAN WINNING ELECTIONS.

Nine months into the current presidency, the cascade of failures has become clear, and voters are looking for a prettier pig.

That had to cause Meet the Press moderator Chuck "Truculent Chipmunk" Todd some anguish.

It's not, though, that we haven't heard this song before.  Remember when Barack "Fake Outrage" Obama got shellacked in 2010?

Presidents come, presidents go.  Speakers of the House come, Speakers of the House go.  Senate majorities come, senate majorities go.  The major parties trade places in these "do a better job" polls, and yet, the discontent continues.

Jeffrey A. Tucker identified the root cause of the discontent, in the middle of a meditation on what happens when politicians refuse to accept the results of elections.  "Democracy with a huge and entrenched permanent bureaucracy, a deep state that is impervious to election outcomes, a thicket of laws and regulations created by people long dead that still exist on the books, and spending commitments that do not change regardless of who is in charge, is not really providing peaceful transition at all. It becomes a veneer that the ruling class uses to entrench the status quo."

The problem, though, is that the permanent bureaucracy is the Croly Ghost Incarnate, permanently carrying out the Intent of Congress as codified by Congresses long since adjourned and signed by presidents long dead.  Voters are merely sheep to be herded, and neither political party is willing to campaign on restoring Congressional or popular authority.  Thus the Experts Misrule.

[Associate Justice Stephen] Breyer and his political allies on the left and throughout the Democrat Party have unfailing faith in the technocracy; it’s near-religious, and we’re all living in it.

For the past 18 months, we’ve suffered under the thumb of this sort of unchecked bureaucracy: Closed schools, masked children, shuttered businesses, canceled weddings, restricted hospitals, forbidden funerals — even the public drug dens and homeless camps now filling major cities are products of CDC “guidance.” For “public health and safety,” we’re told.

But while it’s been in full public view these past 18 months, the reality is we have increasingly suffered under the thumb of unchecked bureaucracy since President Woodrow Wilson; its power and influence growing stronger each year, while the executive and congressional power and will to curb it have lessened.

Some of that growth is natural: influence craves influence, power craves power. But much of it is the result either of active policies in favor of it (or a failure to enact policies restricting it), driven by men like Wilson and men like Breyer — highly educated and seriously intelligent men who think that we, the people, ought not rule ourselves; the experts will take care of that.

The Democrats are more prone to create commissions and enact new regulations, but Republicans in Congress have figured out that pushing the citizens around is a pretty good gig.  That leaves the Permanent Government with destructive powers.  It takes an Act of Congress, and a lot of Presidential Influence, to clear out the real clutter.

Most of the authors cited today correctly want federal judges to fix the problem by limiting the power of bureaucrats to make and enforce law.

That would be desirable, but I’d go much further. We should eliminate almost all of the agencies, programs, and departments that clutter Washington. Then the problem of the administrative state automatically disappears.

That's asking a lot of either major party.

Until voters reject the false binary choice the pundits keep pushing at us, we're likely to see the "better able to fix things" honor going to the out-of-power party until it becomes the in-power party.