The Fifth Brick What Good Government Actually Requires — Part Five

The FCC, The First Amendment, and The News That Used to Be News

The founding charter of the Federal Communications Commission is the Communications Act of 1934 — an independent federal mandate enacted by Congress to regulate the airwaves in the public interest.

I encourage everyone to look it up. Read what it was designed to do. Then compare that to what it is currently doing.

The gap is the story.

The airwaves are public property. Broadcast licenses are issued in the public trust — not as private rights but as public obligations. The entity that receives a license to use the public airwaves accepts a responsibility to serve the public interest. That was the founding principle. That was the deal.

Somewhere along the way the deal changed.

Today a handful of corporations own most of what Americans see and hear. When that many outlets are controlled by that few owners the news stops being news and becomes something else. Call it perspective. Call it editorial direction. Call it what it actually is — propaganda with a news desk and a theme song.

This will be worth repeating in future segments because it touches everything. An informed citizenry is the foundation under the foundation. You cannot have accountability without information. You cannot have meaningful elections without accurate news. You cannot have a functioning democracy when the information ecosystem is owned by people with specific financial and political interests in what you believe.

Now add the Inspector Generals.

We have them. Or we had them. Their purpose is straightforward — independent oversight of the agencies they monitor, specifically designed to catch corruption and prevent regulatory capture. A check on the checkers. An independent eye on the people making the rules.

The current administration fired most of them.

The same oversight that would have monitored what the administration itself was doing — gone. Not restructured. Not replaced. Removed. Because independent oversight of your own behavior is inconvenient when your behavior requires oversight.

This is not a political attack. It is an illustration of exactly why the executive branch needs hard limits on what it can and cannot touch. There need to be areas of the civil service where executive orders have little to no effect. Where the order arrives and the response is not a court challenge but a rubbish bin. Some things should simply be beyond the reach of any single administration regardless of who won the last election.

The FCC is one of those things.

Its job is regulation. Monitor acquisitions. Prevent monopolies. Protect the public interest in the airwaves it licenses. What is not — what should not be — in its charter is any role in determining what speech is acceptable to the current occupant of the White House.

And yet.

For anyone paying attention — look up the details of what happened with Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and the Daily Show. The FCC was used as a direct instrument of executive pressure to coerce networks into dropping programming the president found unfavorable. Not illegal content. Not obscenity. Programming he didn’t like.

That is not regulation. That is a threat wearing a regulatory costume.

In our new foundation the safeguards have to be structural not assumed. No presidential pressure moves the needle because the president cannot fire the people holding the needle. Independence is not a courtesy — it is an architecture. Built in. Locked. Not dependent on the good faith of whoever currently holds power.

I can remember when the news was presented as news. Facts. This is what is happening. If an outlet wanted to offer opinion it was called an editorial and labeled as such. The separation was clear and it was honored because the public expected it and the license required it.

That line has been erased. Rebuilding it requires more than nostalgia. It requires structural protection with enforceable consequences.

You cannot have the First Amendment and suppress it simultaneously. That is not how the system was designed to work.

And here is the danger that goes beyond any single administration or any single network or any single late night host who said something unflattering.

When you find a way to circumvent one rule — even a small one, even quietly, even with a plausible justification — the next rule becomes easier. And the one after that. The erosion is always gradual until suddenly it isn’t gradual at all.

There need to be consequences.

Fast ones. Enforceable ones.

The First Amendment is not a suggestion. It is the first brick for a reason.

The Fourth Brick What Good Government Actually Requires — Part Four

The Judicial Branch

The Supreme Court was never designed to be a political prize.

It has become one anyway.

Every president now treats Supreme Court appointments as the most important legacy decision of their term — not because they care deeply about judicial philosophy but because they are buying future outcomes. The pocket justice. The reliable vote. The insurance policy wearing a robe.

The result is a court whose decisions are predictable before the arguments are heard. Everyone knows which way each justice will rule on any politically charged question because everyone knows who appointed them and what was expected in return. That is not justice. That is scorekeeping in robes.

The fix is not complicated. It is just threatening to the people who benefit from the current arrangement.

More justices. Randomly assigned. Term limited. Appointed by peers not presidents.

Not a specific number — the number is less important than the principle. Enough justices that no single president can stack the composition. Assigned to rotating panels by lottery so nobody can predict which justices will hear which case. Appointed by their fellow jurists rather than by the politician who wants to own their vote. Term limited to twelve or eighteen years — long enough to develop genuine expertise, short enough to prevent the court from calcifying around a single political moment.

The lottery is the key. You cannot game a random draw. You cannot have a justice in your pocket if you don’t know which pocket they’ll be sitting in when your case arrives. The pipeline between political appointment and predetermined outcome gets broken not by ideology but by randomness.

But the most important brick in the judicial wall has nothing to do with composition.

It has to do with enforcement.

Right now the Supreme Court can rule and the executive branch can say no. And nothing happens. The court has no army. The court has no marshals with actual authority. The court has strongly worded opinions and the assumption that the executive branch will comply because it always has before.

That assumption has been tested and found wanting.

Here is a question worth sitting with.

Every lower court in America has enforcement authority. A district judge can hold anyone in contempt and have them detained. Federal marshals exist specifically to enforce court orders at every level of the federal judiciary.

Except the highest one.

The Supreme Court — the final word on constitutional law, the last institutional check on executive power — operates on the honor system.

What good is the honor system if no one honors it?

We have now seen what happens when that hope runs out.

At what point do we acknowledge that the highest court in the land deserves at least the enforcement authority we grant to every court below it?

The Supreme Court needs its own enforcement mechanism. A Marshal’s service with the specific authority to detain anyone — anyone — that the court by majority vote determines is willfully operating outside their constitutional limits and has become a national threat.

No exceptions. No immunity. No rank that places a person beyond the reach of a court order.

The moment a president — or anyone else — can look at a Supreme Court ruling and respond with effective impunity the entire architecture of the republic becomes decorative. Pretty columns on a building with no foundation.

The court says no and the no has to mean something.

That is the fourth brick.

Not a perfect court. Not an infallible court. Just one that cannot be owned before the case is filed and cannot be ignored after the ruling is issued.

Justice without enforcement is just a word.

Before we go any further building a foundation for the future we have to stop and look at reality.

What we have is a mess. A partisan battlefield where ninety percent of the effort and legislation is directed toward power — who is in charge and who is making the rules. And the needs of the people are in reality not taken into consideration. Oh, lip service is given on every stump any good politician can find to state their cause. And their cause is to get themselves reelected.

So in all honesty — is this a pipe dream? Are we just sitting here grooving to Grace Slick singing White Rabbit?

Or is this doable.

I believe it is. Can it be done overnight? No. But it can be done.

Honesty point number two. Who will be the strongest opponents to effective change? The entrenched politicians themselves. They voted for their own terms, their own pay, their own retirement, their own power. They don’t want to give it up.

Well. F them.

What it will take is us. But not just us in numbers — an educated us. An involved us. It is like wanting to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Cheryl Ladd while eating another pint of Häagen-Dazs. It isn’t going to happen without the exercise. You need muscles before you can flex them.

Think of what I am proposing as a blueprint in its early stages. Something to be thrown around, talked about, redrawn, picked apart and rewritten. And when you’re done — go back and compare it to the original and start building. That is, if you truly want something better.

It isn’t going to magically appear on its own.

We will talk about many things. Healthcare — what should we expect, what do we want, and what is actually reasonable? It’s easy to say free healthcare but someone still has to pay for it. Education — what good is a PhD if you can’t get a job? Maybe trade schools are a good thing. Should the Washington reflecting pool reflect something worth reflecting or just be a pretty shade of blue? The list could go on forever. But I’m old — so I promise you it will be a reasonable list.

And we will address capitalism. After all it is what got us here. I am all for it. But let’s put it in perspective. Who gets what and how much is enough?

It’s all about the seeds. You need to supply the earth, the water and the fertilizer — if any can be found under the current regime.

We also need a label. We all like labels. We need labels. It’s the American Way. This is supposed to be a Democratic Republic we live in.

I’m not so sure that label fits very well anymore.

What do you think?

The obvious goal with this set of foundation blocks isn’t to fix the broken system. It’s to provide a structure with enough strength that it cannot be so easily broken and manipulated again.

The strength comes from simplicity.

Not complexity.

The Third Brick What Good Government Actually Requires — Part Three

There is a tradition in American politics so embedded that most people never question it.

The president wins. The president hands out cabinet positions. The cabinet positions go to the people who helped the president win — donors, allies, loyalists, true believers, and occasionally someone who spent the entire campaign calling for the department they now run to be abolished.

We call this governing.

It isn’t.

It is the thank you gift system dressed up as executive leadership. Party favors with confirmation hearings. And while career civil servants generally do the actual work underneath the political appointees, the damage happens when the unqualified person at the top starts making policy. Policy driven not by expertise or national interest but by the ideology, ego, or donor relationships of someone who got the job because they made the right phone calls at the right time.

The confirmation process was supposed to prevent the worst of this. In theory Congress evaluates the nominee and decides whether they are qualified to lead a critical department. In practice — as we have watched in painful real time — partisan confirmation is theater. When the system is controlled by one party the hearings become a formality and the outcome is predetermined regardless of qualification.

So here is the question the third brick asks.

What if the president didn’t pick the cabinet?

Not entirely. Not unilaterally. What if the senior positions in critical departments — Defense, State, Justice, Intelligence, the Federal Reserve — were filled by professionals who advanced through their own institutional ranks on merit, competence, and demonstrated performance? The way military officers advance. The way career diplomats advance. The way the civil service was designed to work before political appointees started parachuting in over the people who actually know the job.

The president would then work within that professional framework to accomplish the agenda the voters elected them to execute.

Which brings us to the vice president.

Right now the vice president is chosen to win a state, appeal to a demographic, or balance a ticket geographically. They are an electoral calculation wearing the costume of a governing partner. Your running mate is whoever helps you win. What happens after winning is a separate conversation.

What if it wasn’t?

What if the vice president was required to be a genuine working partner — someone who shared the governing agenda, complemented the president’s specific weaknesses, and was capable of actually running the country if called upon? Not a campaign asset. A co-architect.

That changes everything downstream.

A president who has to pick a genuine partner picks differently than a president assembling an electoral coalition. A ticket built around a shared agenda attracts a cabinet built around executing that agenda. If the country faces a climate crisis the executive team running on clean energy solutions has the expertise and the congressional backing to address it. If national security is the crisis the team built around genuine military and diplomatic competence has the credibility to lead.

There would still be infighting. There will always be infighting. Human nature doesn’t get reformed by better institutional design.

But more handshakes and less backstabbing is not a naive hope. It is what happens when you change the incentive structure. Right now the incentive is loyalty to one person. Change the incentive to competence in service of a shared agenda and the culture follows the incentive.

The military figured this out. You do not hand the Joint Chiefs to someone’s campaign donor. You advance through the ranks, demonstrate competence at every level, and earn the position. The fact that this system was recently dismantled in favor of loyalty appointments is not an argument against the system. It is the strongest possible argument for protecting it with something more durable than institutional habit and assumed good faith.

Professional advancement. Merit confirmation. A vice president who is a partner not a prop. A cabinet built to execute an agenda rather than reward the people who funded it.

The Second Brick What Good Government Actually Requires — Part Two

If accountability is the foundation then the second brick is simple.

Nobody stays forever.

Term limits. Age accountability. The systematic removal of dead wood before it becomes the structure itself. The recognition that in any healthy organization — a business, a military unit, a family — the inability to remove someone who has outlived their effectiveness isn’t loyalty. It’s institutional rot.

We have watched what happens when people stay too long. The institution bends around them rather than them serving the institution. J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years. Nobody could remove him because nobody could afford the cost of trying. That is not a feature of good government. That is a cautionary tale that we apparently need to be told more than once.

On Age

A hard cutoff number is both cruel and imprecise. Minds age differently. A 79 year old with a video tape memory and fifty years of accumulated pattern recognition may serve better than a 55 year old running on talking points and donor calls. A number on a birth certificate tells you nothing useful.

What tells you something useful is behavior.

A committee empowered to evaluate and recommend further medical and mental evaluation when behavior becomes noticeable. Not partisan. Not elected. Drawn from retired judges, physicians, and civic leaders with staggered appointments designed to insulate from political pressure. The process itself is the deterrent — most people approaching genuine cognitive decline would rather resign than submit to public evaluation.

The goal isn’t to humiliate. It’s to create a dignified off ramp before the institution suffers.

On Term Limits

The structure matters as much as the limit.

A president at two four year terms has enough time to govern without enough time to become permanent. A senator at two six year terms — twelve years — learns the job properly and builds something durable without becoming a resident. A representative on perpetual two year cycles is always campaigning and never governing. Move them to four year terms. Give them enough runway to actually do the work.

The goal is sufficient time to be effective without sufficient time to become immovable.

On the Two Party System

Here is the brick that will make everyone uncomfortable.

Eliminate it.

Not reform it. Not balance it. Remove the institutional infrastructure that makes it the only viable option. No party designations on ballots. No party primaries with public funding. No party based committee assignments in Congress.

Watch what happens to the PACs when there are no teams to back. Watch what happens to the dark money when the jersey colors disappear. Citizens United becomes considerably less useful when there is no party machinery to funnel the money into.

This isn’t naive. It’s the recognition that the two party system has become the primary mechanism for preventing exactly the accountability the foundation requires.

On Compensation

If we require fidelity we require fidelity.

Public servants receive public servant compensation. A PERS program like other government employees. Healthcare through the same options available to federal workers. A pathway into continued government service for those who want to contribute after their term ends.

No golden umbrellas. No lifetime pensions after a single term. No healthcare for life unavailable to the constituents who funded it.

The same standard applied to the person making the rules as the person living under them.

That is the second brick.

Nobody stays forever. Nobody lives above the system they were elected to serve.

Build on that and the walls start to mean something.

The Foundation What Good Government Actually Requires — Part One

Accountability.

Not the political science version. Not the talking point. The real thing. The kind you learn before you’re old enough to vote.

When you break something you admit it. There is no rug. There is no sweeping. You live with what you have and if you don’t have it you earn it. If you make a promise you keep it — or you have a legitimate reason for not doing so that you share with the people you made it to.

That’s it. That’s the foundation.

Everything else — healthcare, infrastructure, justice, national security, the institutions we depend on daily without noticing — sits on top of that one simple principle. Remove it and nothing else holds. The walls crack. The roof comes down. The building that took two hundred and fifty years to construct becomes a very expensive pile of rubble with gold curtains.

We have watched what happens when accountability disappears from the top.

I will lower your taxes. What goes unspoken is that someone’s benefits will pay for it. I will protect your benefits. What goes unspoken is where the money comes from. The empty promise isn’t always an outright lie. Sometimes it’s just half the truth delivered with enough confidence that nobody does the math until the bill arrives.

The bill always arrives.

Presidential immunity is the legal formalization of unaccountability. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision didn’t create the problem — it just removed the last pretense that the problem didn’t exist. When the president does it it isn’t illegal. Nixon said that too. It didn’t work then because the institution held.

The institution didn’t hold this time.

Which means the foundation has to be rebuilt with something stronger than institutional habit and assumed good faith. The founders were obsessed with this question. They had just lived under a king. Every check, every balance, every separation of power was the answer to one central anxiety — what happens when the wrong person gets the power?

They built a back door. A way to stop something. Checks and balances as the architectural response to the certainty that power will eventually be held by someone who shouldn’t have it.

That back door has to be properly locked from both sides. No presidential immunity. Full stop. The same standard applied to the person signing the orders as to the person receiving them.

To require fidelity requires fidelity.

That covers governance and marriage and institutional trust and the social contract simultaneously. You cannot demand loyalty from a country you are actively betraying. You cannot require honesty from institutions you are actively corrupting. You cannot ask the American people to follow rules you have granted yourself immunity from.

One standard. No exceptions. No immunity.

That is the foundation.

Without it nothing else we build will stand.