Quote of the Day
A few Trump Admin officials said some very dumb anti-2A things over the weekend. They got criticism and walked back those statements today. On the actual substantive policy and law, the Admin has generally been very good on the issue, although we do strongly disagree with them on some things.
Democrats, for their part, said some very pro-2A things over the weekend in support of Alex Pretti. But by Monday, they were already back to banning the gun and magazines he carried.
I’d love nothing more for Democrats to truly support the 2A and make the issue less partisan. But that just isn’t the reality. Trump may say things like “take the guns first.” Democrats actually do it.
Kostas Moros @MorosKostas
Posted on X, January 26, 2026
Barb and I briefly discussed this last night…
As I told Barb, “I don’t believe politicians have actual principles. They will say and do whatever they think is good for them politically.”
So, you have to either make your desires politically rewarding enough for them to obey the law or abandon all hope of them behaving in a constitutional manner. The judges at the SCOTUS level are better and where I place most of my hope of getting the gun issue straightened out. Hence, I donate money to the Second Amendment groups which appear to be most effective in the courts.
My remaining hope is in creating new gun owners and increasing the enthusiasm of existing owners. Hence, my taking new shooters to the range and Boomershoot.
The collectivist/statist/authoritarians (known as the “Dem-wing of the UniParty” in the US) has exactly ONE principle:
“Maintain power and control BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.”
Lying, cheating, fraud, murder…any means necessary. If it takes the murder of 10 million people to maintain their power and control (including political power, wealth, etc.) they’re just fine with that.
We normies like to say that, “If the Dem-wingers didn’t have double standards they’d have no standards at all.” That’s not correct, since their only standard is “that which maintains our power and control”.
If we can just bear this in mind then their motivations and actions become very clear.
“As I told Barb, “I don’t believe politicians have actual principles. They will say and do whatever they think is good for them politically.””
I have said similar things for many years. In fact, I think it might be the best definition of the word – that “holding an elected office” does not *necessarily* make you a “politician”… and you can tell which ones aren’t by the fact that most of them don’t hold that office long, and often by choice (they don’t run again).
Do judges really have principles? A handful of them, perhaps. But the vast majority of them wouldn’t recognize a Constitutional principle, let alone obey one, if they could avoid it. Justice Roberts is a prime example. Justices Brown and Sotomayor are more blatant and extreme examples of this, and in their case I blame actual dishonesty instead of just Constitutional imbecility.
And this isn’t new; the same was obviously true for Taney, and St. George Tucker documented blatant disregard for the shiny new Constitution when he wrote about it back in 1803.
Politicians are nearly always the worst narcissistic scum. They gravitate to power. Hollywood for the ugly and glib. We’d be better off using a lottery system of qualified citizens in a manner similar to jury duty.
This is why I’m not for term limits, but rather incumbency prevention.
You get a term in a legislative positions, then you get NOTHING for the same amount of time. No cabinet posts, no government employment, no positions of public trust or authority, no paid nonprofit or corporate board positions and no non-paid positions if they are getting government grants or contracts more than 10% of total revenue, no ambassadorships, no blue ribbon commissions, no advisory positions; as far as government at any level is concerned, you’re a NOBODY and you get NOTHING, just like everyone else. It follows there there should be no pensions from public legislative office; pay into the 401K like everyone else.
While in office, everything you do is recorded and available for constituent review, in exactly the same manner as a cop with a body camera: all use of public power is under review. You have one job in politics and that’s all you get to do, strictly within that scope. No fundraising; you don’t have a campaign you can even engage in for quite some time, and you’re not going to do it on anyone else’s behalf, either, as a condition of employment. No party activity except as an individual, non-decision-making member. You have an obligation to your constituents, within the scope of your position, and nothing else. If you want to talk about the plight of [people] in [foreign land], go do it as a private citizen on your own time, not your constituent’s time and their delegated authority.
And if you can’t manage to keep your political body’s appropriations under the actual revenues, or fail to pay down outstanding debt to retire it within 18 years (or whatever the age of majority is), either because of policy of the majority or persuasiveness of the minority or simple incompetence/negligence, you’re OUT and you’re NOBODY for twice as long. That’s not an absolute ‘no’ to public debt, but it must be paid for with personal consequences.
When your time in the wilderness is done, and the public looks kindly on the results of your work after a time without your thumb on the scale, we’ll consider your campaign for another position.
As an incentive structure, it works against the narcissist and power-hungry: they want the power but can’t handle being a nobody. It undercuts a lot of lobbying because there is little future value to buying the politician; the transactionality is always immediate and has a high likelihood to be exposed and eliminate a political future unless it was strong in the constituents’ favor. Everyone going into office would have to have a proverbial Day Job to go back to; no more Bernie Sanders or Joe Bidens that never worked a productive day in their lives. Doesn’t mean an idle rich person couldn’t just ride out their Time In The Wilderness on their trust fund, but a constituency that elects such a person frankly deserves what it gets. But I think the biggest thing from this kind of scheme would be simply making the idea of lifetime career politician an impossibility; out of the simple need to eat, public office would always be a side-gig.
A beautiful idea, but the “revolving door” would compensate.
Hard term limits gets closer (especially if that limit is for all offices combined), but only closer. People are too good at working around existing rules.
There are no perfect solutions, just a different choice of benefits you hope for and detriments that you will live with.
But there are plenty of bad solutions with few real benefits and plenty of profitless expenses.
Bod points excellently stated. Thank you for that.
I’ve suggested something similar: a lifetime limit on serving in elected office. I favor “no more than 5 terms or portions thereof, none of which shall be for more than 2 terms in the same office nor shall any such two term service be for contiguous terms; such service also precludes any other governmental service, voluntary or paid, or receiving any remuneration from any government in the United States outside of such direct service, the only exception being salary, benefits and retirement commensurate with rank in the armed forces of the United States.”
(I’d stipulate it be a Constitutional-level provision, but we’d have to come up with some means of enforcement, which, today, is lacking.)
However it’s accomplished we need to kill dead not just the practice but also the idea of career government service all the way down from elected office to midnight janitor. I’d even establish an absolute maximum lifetime limit on all non-elected employment in any government in the U.S., say, to no more than 10 years, with no taxpayer-paid medical benefits or retirement – employer-negotiated but employee-paid, just like much of the private sector. If one hires on at the Department of Whatever knowing up front they’re out in X years they – hopefully – will regard it as an opportunity to serve, learn some stuff, then move on to A Real Job.
“Oh my gosh, that employee churn will make government so inefficient;” like any government agency or service is a bastion of efficiency now. At the least it will reduce the potential pool of employee candidates or potentially lead to that particular agency, or service, simply not existing in Government World. Will agencies “lose long term expertise”? Absolutely. Will that make them more dependent upon contractors? Probably, but were all proposals, RFPs/RFQs, contract
requirements, completed contracts, etc. posted publicly for all to see with the names of the responsible goverment employee(s), it would help keep them sane and, hopefully, honest.
Whatever the solution, we are in dire need of one, preferably intelligently constructed and implemented rather than slapped together out of random parts post-revolutionary, or post-economic collapse, by people whose primary interest is accumulating power and lining their own pockets.
I’d be a bit more fine grained in the limit on employment at public expense:
2520 days of safe employment
That’s 10 years, after taking out weekends and holidays.
Want to be employed more than that? You need to be doing something inherently unsafe as an essential element of that day’s duty. Furthermore, you can’t just say you’re doing something unsafe, but there would need to be something to back that up: regular safety training; mandatory issued PPE (which may include a firearm); a revokable qualification to perform that dangerous thing; a legal duty to act in defense of others. It wouldn’t be enough to simply be injured on the job if that injury wasn’t an essential risk of doing the job that was being actively mitigated, so no slip-and-fall whoopsies making the day count as ‘dangerous’.
I’d apply it to the military, too. Plenty of jobs in the military in a nice, air conditioned cubicle and the biggest risk is a papercut. Neat; should be a civilian job. Take that same job, require you to have a sidearm on you, expected to run towards the sound of danger, and routinely trained to use that sidearm effectively at a moment’s notice in defense of others; now it counts as dangerous duty and doesn’t count against your lifetime limit.
Something a little different but that would also be useful: fixes salaries. Have the salary of an elected official be fixed starting from the beginning of the first term. In other words, if you serve 20 terms in the House your salary is whatever it was 40 years ago.
Not quite a term limit but useful as a way to discourage inflation.
” Have the salary of an elected official be fixed starting from the beginning of the first term.”
OOh, I LIKE that one! The only “work around” would be something we want them to do, anyway!
Properly constructed incentives are always a good thing.
But this solution may incentivize corruption with insider trading, payoffs, etc.
“But this solution may incentivize corruption with insider trading, payoffs, etc.”
The “incentive-o-meter” is already fully maxed out on that one.
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
Milton Friedman
One of my favorite quotes from a man with many, many good quotes.
1/3 of SCOTUS is better, 1/3 is worse and 1/3 are political weather vanes.
“Politicians have no principals”
Aside from all the comments above being true.
Principals are taught as part of a national culture. We demand them from politicians because we demand them from everyone else, including ourselves.
So why the politicians of today so in your face with the slaver-ass grifting?
Because we don’t enforce a culture that works on ourselves and those around us. You can’t farm out culture to the lowest bidding “professional”.
Which is what we pretty much have done.
There is a reason political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
(And one might notice they never hesitate to use them on you.)
And just like stopping drug boats. The most effective way is to make some examples.
But ever and always. What we demand of our politicians, we must demand of ourselves and everyone else around us first.
Making tar and feathers great again might help.
Politicians of all parties benefit from government created problems. They have no interest in solving them. Wouldn’t “democracy” be better served if officials were not “elected” from eager applicants but “selected” by random drawings from the population?
This has been suggested by many people and inclined to agree in part. There should be some vetting. Age, mental health, criminal history, etc.
One of the problems with the current system is that being highly skilled in the “interview” process is not a good indicator of on the job performance.
“One of the problems with the current system is that being highly skilled in the “interview” process is not a good indicator of on the job performance. ”
Nearly all measures are proxies of the thing we actually want.
For instance, “standardized testing” is a poor proxy for most things, but it is a pretty good proxy for predicting how well students “do school”, so it predicts future educational success decently well.
The problem is that testing people directly for higher office is open to ridiculous manipulation by those *already in office*, so it would be captured to serve incumbent interests in… well, probably a negative amount of time (that is, before the first usage).
I do not pretend to have a solution. But a good understanding of the problems helps in finding one.
Not all problems HAVE solutions. Most do at least have some mitigations…
One of my favorite quotes on the subject –
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
– Charles de Gaulle