It's actually a more interesting column than just that. Really worth reading. He's raising a question to which I don't have an answer, and neither does he, really: Why isn't the Constitution working as planned?
He writes: "Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it." But as he says, the system is designed to force ambition to counteract ambition.
A Congress full of "abject careerists," i.e., ambitious men, should be just the ticket. But they're not. The problem as he describes it, perhaps rightly, isn't so much the ambitiousness of our presidents as our propensity to elect betas to Congress. Why do we do that?
Anyway, in arguing "It's not the system, it's this parade of castrated poodles in Congress," he sounds a bit too much like post-Soviet communists trying to explain that there was nothing wrong with the theory, but the Bolsheviks hijacked the revolution.
Obviously, the US constitution had a long, successful run, unlike any communist revolution anywhere, but there's still the same problem: If the Bolsheviks could so easily hijack the revolution, maybe the problem *was* with the theory?
And if, as is true, Congress has improvidently delegated more and more policymaking power to presidents, maybe there's something wrong with the Constitution? Perhaps men are not as naturally ambitious as Madison believed: Perhaps most like being ruled by a king?
Perhaps the Constitution needs to be amended, in light of this, affirmatively to prevent Congress from handing off its responsibilities? Or is it a function of congressional culture?
I'm not sure what's wrong at all, but we can't say, "The system's perfect, it's just that these schmucks aren't good enough for it." The perfect system *anticipates rule by schmucks.* Madison figured they'd all be power-mad schmucks. But what if they're lazy, cowardly schmucks?
"Laziness and cowardice" are obviously as much a part of human nature as "ambition and avarice for power." Somehow the Constitution needs to compensate for that, too.
