Oof. Sorry for the wait. Wanted to give a thorough answer.
>I think this is another way of saying that leaders do not have absolute power and there must be some level of consent of the governed behind what the leaders do.
Absolutely spot on.
>The word progress entails views that could be described as "politically progressive". While I agree that what you describe (grassroots efforts, awareness, shifts in public opinion) have characterized progressive movements in the US, I think those represent only a subset of the relevant political trends to consider in our analysis, such as right wing movements that have been remarkably retrogressive
Careful there, you're mixing up senses of the word "progress". I was originally using it to communicate the sense of gaining headway toward facilitating a particular change, without respect to who or what that change is associated with. I.e. we have progressed toward our goal. Any side can and does make progress in winning over the majority mindshare.
In American politics however, there is the label of being a Progressive, which is generally used to describe more centrist voters on the left right spectrum with maybe some more willingness to accept that label in recent times on the Right. That is a totally different sense of the word I tried and failed to avoid.
>I would characterize the items you mention as (broadly) institutionalized corruption. As powerful interests obtain greater advantage, they allow the system to evolve in ways that protects their power. There has not been any significant public movement to alter the course of this trend.
I vehemently agree. The delegation of matters of administrative lawmaking in particular to the Executive branch being one of the most troubling. The far more concerning though, is the usurpation of the process of actually writing legislation by entrenched special interest, combined with playing extraordinarily fast and loose with what gets legislated and passed, without initial review for Constitutionality, combined with reconciling the corner cases of the Common Law system with the Constitution. An unconstitutional law can be passed, enforced, and allowed to stand for many years before the environment is right for an attempt at judicial strike down, and there is little to no stomach for periodically repealing/revisiting legislation to keep the books clean as it were. Many of these failings come from overreliance on lobbyists supplying verbatim bill text, but there is also a lot of misunderstanding in terms of just people writing bills badly, or writing bills on topics they don't understand without getting input by an impartial group beholden to the tax payer. This was made all the more frequent through dissolution of legislative research arms like the OTA, which was killed by ideologues back in the 90's, likely because they were often at odds with entrenched industry interests. It has gotten to the point where legislation is becoming more reliant on party-line towing, or trying to engineer party majorities rather than being based on a best faith effort to doing what is best for the nation as a whole. Which requires concession on both sides, and a willingness to understand there are just some things that will not get through and maybe shouldn't even be attempted at the Federal level.
>This was indeed the intent at the outset, but we have seen a massive growth in the size and reach of the Federal government, both in terms of size/scope of the government itself and also in terms of the percentage of lobbying dollars spent at the Federal level. For lobbying interests, it's easier/cheaper to focus on one target than 50.
Faster information propagation and the rise of the national media has played a hand in that, as well as a change in the apparent philosophy of representation. The classical idea of a representative is an agent who operates as a sort of floating average of the populace. The combination of first-past-the-post voting system, faster feedback loops via the national media/polling, and campaign finance laws have disrupted the way the Congress should work based on views the Founders had in mind. The idea they laid out was to have level headed people making the best calls on their own merit, and worked well given a relatively small base of laws to sift through. Now though, most legislators come in with an agenda, run into the wall of old business still stuck in the legislative cycle, have to react to new business in ways consistent with maintaining polling numbers, and need to filter through or delegate the filtering of frankly ridiculous levels of information. My primary concern is that legislators seem to have become chess pieces for professional social engineers instead of well-versed in the material on which they will be acting. An undesirable course of events if one takes into account the fact that part of the Library of Congress mission is to make available the breadth of knowledge required to allow legislators to effectively legislate. Instead, they are essentially hounded by people who shape their career around getting what their employer wants instead of presenting things in a manner not instantly discernable as biased and cherrypicked.
>W.R.T. The Bill of Rights
Many of the attacks on the Bill of Rights have been enabled by the Common Law system. This is either a bug, or a feature depending on who you ask, and is exacerbated by the fact that the layperson is ill-equipped to understand the mire of complexity that is our adversarial legal framework.
The corpus of precedent, and its constantly shifting nature makes a true reconciliation of the historical output of the legal system difficult because the very meaning of straightforward statements written on paper can be twisted in ways disconnected from plain-English grammars as long as recognizably valid legal reasoning is employed; combine that with a reticence of judges to regularly challenge precedent, and you run into legal drift over time.
The adversarial nature of the institution of the Judiciary also renders it vulnerable to a form of Social Engineering where strategic priming, jury/venue/judge engineering perpetuates various patterns of systemic abuse that do not quite seem to have effective countermeasures.
Working as designed, many would say, but I'm not sure that it's really possible to reconcile the fact that the barrister/solicitor occupation is locked behind significant financial barriers to entry, and there being such a disparity what types of outcomes that are generated given different financial resources to expend; even if that may be a somewhat inevitable outcome of the free market system. What I mean by this disparity is the inability of the justice system to act as a sufficient tempering force for white collar/corporate malfeasance compared to relatively straightforward outcomes in non-corporate/white collar cases.
I don't think there is any willful aspiration on most actors in the system's part, but there is definitely a problem of equal access to quality representation in our system that I think could be remedied by a system whereby private practices are delegated some quota of public defense case load in return for the privilege of practicing.
W.R.T. malfeasance by the government.
The Office of the Inspector General needs teeth, and to be separate from the Executive, but tasked and empowered with full jurisdiction to cut through Executive privilege and national security concerns if need be. The whistleblowers/watchdogs of the Executive branch cannot afford to be beholden to a President directly. Who they should be I am not sure, but clearly, they do not seem to have any oomph in regards to curtailing malfeasant behavior under their current operating model.
Again, sorry for the delay, but I wanted a chance to get in some good thinking on things. It's still not the most carefully thought out bit, but I'd feel remiss putting it off any longer.
I've still got a lot of cogitation to do before I'll be satisfied with my articulation, I'm sure.