America no longer has a government of the people for the people.

The chambers of Congress are occupied by rulers for the rulers.

They do not parley. They speechify. They grandstand. It is not a real parliament.

So says Mark Steyn with scorn. He writes that he finds himself “at odds with virtually the entire politico-media class” in his reaction to “the ‘storming’ of the US Capitol” on January 6, 2021.

He thinks the members of Congress got a taste of what they deserve: a scary expression of the anger citizens feel towards them. And we agree with him.

The political class (represented by a Speaker who flies home to San Francisco on her own government plane) has been largely insulated from the pathologies they have loosed upon the land. For a few hours [on January 6] they weren’t.

In a self-governing republic of citizen-legislators, that ought to be sobering and instructive. But, of course, it wasn’t. Still, I was surprised that even politicians and pundits could utter all that eyewash about “the citadel of democracy” and “a light to the world” with a straight face. It’s a citadel of crap, and the lights went out long ago …

I despise the United States Congress, and not merely for the weeks I had to spend there during the Clinton impeachment trial. My contempt pre-dates that circus. It dates to the moment I first realized, as a recent arrival to this land, that when [a member] is giving some overwrought speech on a burning issue he is speaking to an entirely empty chamber – because there are no debates, because most of these over-entouraged Emirs of Incumbistan are entirely incapable of debate …

The American media go along with the racket, and there’s only the one pool camera with the fixed tight shot so that you can’t see the joint is deserted and the guy is talking to himself. …

I have never seen such rubbish in the House of Commons at Ottawa or Westminster or their equivalents around the Commonwealth – and it’s a charade in which the media are all-in.

So it’s a Potemkin parliament.

That leads easily to the next stage of decay – for why would a Potemkin parliament not degenerate further into a pseudo-legislature? The Covid “relief” bill is 5,593 pages. There is no such thing as a 5,593-page “law” – because no legislator could read it and grasp it. For purposes of comparison, the Government of India Act, which in 1935 was the longest piece of legislation ever drafted in British law and which provided for the government of what are now India, Pakistan and Burma, is 326 pages.

Oh, I’m sure paragons of republican virtue will object that no Indian or Burmese citizen-representatives were involved in that piece of imperial imposition. Well, no American citizen-representatives were involved in the Covid “relief” bill. The legislation was drafted not by legislators, nor by civil servants, nor even by staffers or interns. Instead, a zillion lobbyists wrote their particular carve-outs, and then it got stitched together by some clerk playing the role of Baron von Frankenstein. The “legislators” voted it into law unread, and indeed even unseen, as the Congressional photocopier proved unable to print it: It was a bill without corporeal form, but the yes-men yessed it into law anyway.

Whatever that is, it’s not a republic. …

This institution, this branch of the government of the vast and mighty United States of America, is no “beacon to the world”.

I wish no ill to anyone in the building, but I do support, during the next recess, its complete dismantling and the salting of the earth: it is not a “citadel of democracy”, only a sick perversion thereof. Whatever Sudan and Chad and Waziristan need, it’s not the US Congress.

Whatever the American people need, it’s not this pseudo-legislature; it’s not a corrupt and senile president such as they’re about to get; it’s not a Supreme Court that refuses to judge a case of flagrant fraud and outright defiance of the Constitution in a presidential election.

Has the great experiment in founding a nation on a Constitution designed to give all power to the people failed beyond repair?