Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters and Arizona Sheriffs?

To repeat myself just a little, Wretchard has an interesting take on the sudden end to Charlie Rangel's special status, which for many years exempted him from "the rules".   In reference to the inability of our Ruling Class to notice danger signals around them, he writes:

No better symptom of the absence of alarms is the genuine astonishment of Charles Rangel that it is illegal to break the law.  Almost as a matter of course he concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in income, used Congressional letterhead to solicit donations for private causes, took four rent controlled apartments for himself.  Innocently. He probably didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.   Things had been so sweet, so long that even after he was offered the chance to negotiate his way out of 13 separate violations of House rules and federal statutes he simply refused to believe it was happening. . . 

1.  Those whom the gods will destroy, they first make mad with power.

Charles Rangel’s problem is that the old world has picked this moment to suddenly die underneath him.   He won his last race with 89% of the vote, as big a margin as you can get outside of North Korea or Syria.  Now he faces 13 counts at the hands of colleagues who are his “friends,” but maybe not “friends” enough to lose their next election on his behalf.  It’s unfair in a way.  Nick Nyhart of the Huffington Post says that because the “whole system” is guilty, Charlie Rangel shouldn’t be singled out for punishment.  He wants the Republicans on trial too and hopes Rangel doesn’t have to face ethics charges.  “Rep. Rangel may be the one in the spotlight today, but it’s the whole system that’s guilty.”  He might be right at that.  But he should be careful what he wishes for. The road is like a river.  Once you step on to it, there’s no telling where it takes you. . . .

But what could Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters possibly have in common with Arizona sherrifs facing the dilemma of a federal government unwilling to enforce immigration laws?  I find this observation to be very astute.  Read the whole essay.  We're on the brink of some very serious breakdowns in the way we have been accustomed to the world working:

Although Charles Rangel, Maxine Waters* and Arizona sheriff Paul Babeau have nothing obvious in common, a single thread runs through their recent actions.  Each is unwilling to be reined in.  Rangel and Waters are thumbing their noses at the Congressional ethics committees attempting to investigate them for corruption.  In the instance of the sheriff, he is pushing back against what nearly 70% of the population regard as the irrational immigration policy of not enforcing it. The other side is pushing back too — at the law. “Undocumented and unafraid” was the slogan of 22 self-confessed illegal aliens who sat in five Senator’s offices in the Capitol. . .

“Civil disobedience”, once a term of honor used by those who fought tyranny, now means “I’m walking out with the TV from the store and you can’t stop me.” If Maxine Waters, Charlie Rangel and the “undocumented and unafraid” bunch are willing to simply tear up the tickets in the face of law enforcement, and law enforcement, as typified by Sherrif Joe Arpaio are determined to issue the tickets anyway, what impends is not a simple “failure to communicate” but a warning that the legitimacy of the system is under attack. Fewer and fewer know the rules any more.   And the word that everything is there for the taking is leaking out.   News that a Mexican drug cartel has put a price on Sheriff Arpaio’s head isn’t really so surprising. . .

Pinal County (Ariz.)_ Sheriff Paul Babeu said, “What’s very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU.”  President Obama who ran on being post-everything has partnered with everyone. The result is that no one knows whose side he is on; and that engenders a feeling of betrayal in everyone who thought he was on ‘their’ side.

The problem is that when public policy and its enforcement mechanisms blink on and off like a broken intersection stop sign nobody knows if the signal is meant to be obeyed or not. Eventually people who stare at the light decide ‘not’. . . . .

2.  The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind very fine:

The designers of the American political system set it up to tolerate local dysfunction — the Federal system established limits on power and created firewalls against the spread of the consequences of their abuse.  But those limits were inconvenient to the boundlessly ambitious.  Since World War 2 the narrative has been of increasingly putting the central government in charge of everything. The Super New Dealers are here. That centralized the risk as well. Once the firewalls on imbecility have been dismantled the inevitable consequence, as in the case of the global financial system, is that limits to their dysfunctional effects are removed as well.

Then you have a cascading effect. One reason why systems often don’t fail gradually is because small changes, each seemingly inconsequential in itself, can come together and enable each other. The blaze just jumps when it exceeds a certain temperature. Just as people often think they have more money than they have, the system had less ‘give’ than its masters believed. Now the challenge on the left will be, not as they believed, to ensure their permanent majority, but to simply ensure that the bills are paid and that their routine instructions are followed.   It’s an ancient process, one already known to the Greeks. Hubris, which was defined as “ruin, folly, delusion” is often followed by Nemesis. That wasn’t hard to guess thousands of years ago. But for some moderns, who would have thought it?

3.  When it gets dark enough, you can see the stars.

Are things dark enough now that we can see the stars, or will things get worse first?

"Rep. Maxine Waters is vowing to fight charges that she violated House ethics rules. But Waters may face an uphill battle. . .

. . . Frank inserted language in the TARP that enabled OneUnited to draw $12 million in aid. Frank did this even though OneUnited had what the Post calls a "mixed" record of lending to minority communities. That's a charitable characterization. According to the Globe, the handful of mortgages the bank had written in recent years were mainly to wealthy clients in chic locations, including the South End and Martha's Vineyard, despite the bank's stated mission to support Boston's urban communities. . .

In addition, OneUnited had run afoul of regulators for buying its executives a Porsche. Other perks included a $6.4 million beachfront mansion in Santa Monica the bank says it used to conduct business. . . .

OneUnited has missed all but one of six scheduled payments to the Treasury Department. . .