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**FEBRUARY 12, 2025**

On the Prospect website

House Releases Reverse Robin Hood Resolution [link removed]
It would take food and medicine from the poor and give the money to the rich. But there's nothing even approaching consensus among Republicans. BY DAVID DAYEN

Trump Attacks Child Care for the Most Vulnerable [link removed]
It turns out that you can't just turn the government off and then back on again. BY EMMA JANSSEN

[link removed] Aging Members of Congress Refuse to Disclose Details of Their Top Secret Hospital [link removed]
The Office of the Attending Physician gives politicians nearly unlimited medical care for about $54 a month. BY DANIEL BOGUSLAW

The Exemplary Radical Skeptic [link removed]
Christopher Jencks, one of the Prospect's founding group, has died. BY PAUL STARR

Kuttner on TAP

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**** The People, Yes

What happens when democracy so badly fails to deliver the goods that the citizenry freely choses dictatorship?

This week, Trump's Justice Department and SEC stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977. This statute makes it a crime under U.S. law to bribe a foreign official in order to get a contract.

I have a certain fondness for this law, since I was one of its authors. The law was enacted after an extensive investigation of bribery in foreign contracting that I helped lead when I was working as chief investigator for Sen. William Proxmire, then the chair of the Senate Banking Committee.

The law has been enforced by seven administrations since it was enacted, and it has succeeded in reducing corrupt deals between U.S. corporations and foreign nations, democracies as well as dictatorships. In the 1970s, hundreds of cases of bribery came to light. The most notorious was Lockheed, which bribed officials of Japan, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia to buy its planes. Since 1977, there have been hundreds of convictions and negotiated fines, including of marquee companies such as Alcoa, Bristol Myers Squibb, Hewlett-Packard, Goodyear, and Walmart.

The decision not to enforce the law reflects three things: Trump's desire to help corporate America profit by gaming the rules; his diversion of enforcement resources into activities like tracking down undocumented immigrants; and his affinity for crooks everywhere. (On the same day, the Justice Department dropped the prosecution for bribery and corruption of New York Mayor Eric Adams.)

But the non-prosecution of corrupt corporations that bribe corrupt foreign officials is inside baseball at its finest. Does the general public care?

Earlier this week, CBS and YouGov released a poll [link removed] that showed Trump's approval rating, for the first time ever, in positive territory, 53-47, just about the margin by which Trump won the election. And when you drill down and look at the questions the pollsters asked, it's even more disconcerting.

At least 60 percent of those polled agreed that he was "Tough," "Focused," and "Energetic." Fully 70 percent felt that he was carrying out his campaign promises. And 59 percent supported his program to deport migrants in the country illegally.

However, by a margin of more than 2 to 1, respondents said that Trump was not doing enough to lower prices. The latest inflation numbers came out today [link removed], and they are bad news for Trump. In January, inflation rose to an annual rate of 3 percent.

But it's as if popular support for constitutional democracy and the rule of law is contingent, instrumental, transactional. If the rule of law delivers low-priced eggs, great, we support it. If not, let's give dictatorship a try.

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WHEN THE FOUNDERS OF THIS REPUBLIC carefully designed their checks and balances, complemented by the individual rights guaranteed in the first ten amendments that were ratified as part of the 1789 Constitution, they had three distinct threats in mind.

One was to avoid a monarchy or an overly powerful executive. The Congress was given very substantial power, complemented by a Supreme Court, further checked by federalism.

But the Founders also worried about corruption. Many of the discussions in the

**Federalist Papers** address the dangers of corruption, which was rampant in King George's court and in many of the colonies. The Constitution addressed the risk of corrupt officials profiting from high office with several provisions, including the remedy of impeachment and the emoluments clause.

The Founders were further concerned about the tyranny of the majority-Caesarism-in which a mob allied with a strong president might trample the rights of others. So the various checks and balances, as well as the Bill of Rights, were designed to limit the power of temporary majorities.

In

**Federalist 55**, Madison wrote, "Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." This was emphatically to be a republic, not a democracy, in which a natural aristocracy of the educated and the principled, like the Founders themselves, would govern.

Monarchy, corruption, Caesarism coupled with mob rule. Have you noticed that Trump epitomizes all three?

ULTIMATELY, THE FOUNDERS KNEW that the ultimate safeguard was the hearts of the people. Lincoln also understood that. "Public sentiment is everything," he said in 1858. "With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Today, we are losing public sentiment for the rule of law.

The German ironist Bertolt Brecht, in 1953, made fun of a communist functionary's complaint that the citizens of East Germany were insufficiently appreciative of the party program. Brecht suggested firing the people and getting a new one.

That remedy is not available to us. Winning back popular support for constitutional government will take a long time. Which brings me back to the price of eggs.

To the extent that support for democracy is merely contingent and instrumental, Democratic presidents lost that support by ceasing to champion the pocketbook needs of ordinary people. For 40 years, they opted to support corporate globalization and privileges for Wall Street over the needs of working families, who found themselves without reliable jobs, secure health care, pensions, affordable homes, or affordable college.

No wonder a demagogue promising to make America great again looked good. Biden began a long-overdue shift back toward FDR, but he was too old to be a credible tribune, and Kamala Harris's campaign was a mess of mixed messages.

Trump's vulnerability on inflation is only the beginning of a long road back. But it's a start.

In his celebrated 1936 book-length poem, "The People, Yes," Carl Sandburg wrote:

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again sold.

In the American experience, it has taken great and honorable leadership to overcome cheap trickery and genuinely serve the people. As Sandburg also wrote, writing in the third year of Roosevelt's New Deal,

**Brother may yet line up with brother**.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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