SWAMP-DRAINING LESSONS FROM 1787: A Trump adviser and speechwriter, F.H. Buckley, offers a sweeping perspective on the Washington swamp in his new book, The Republic of Virtue: How We Tried to Ban Corruption, Failed, and What We Can Do About It. Buckley, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, describes how the Founding Fathers sought to create a republic of disinterested public virtue. They admired the British constitution but wanted neither a monarchy nor British-style corruption. At crucial moments in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when extreme nationalists such as Madison proposed a walk-out that might have split the country, it was the prospect of an anti-corruption constitution that kept things together. And that is how the document was drafted.

That was then. Now we’re stuck with a presidential regime that fosters corruption, the wrong kind of federalism and, in Buckley’s words, “the thickest network of patronage ever seen in any country, a crony capitalism in which business partners with government and transfers wealth from the poor to the rich.” Instead of criminalizing political speech, Buckley says, we should scrap nearly all our campaign finance laws, focus instead on reining in lobbyists, and recognize that a purely virtuous state is an impossible chimera.