Unlimited Government

Christopher DeMuth in The American Enterprise

Thomas Jefferson played the pivotal role in choosing the site for our national capital, and selected what was essentially a malarial swamp. He had been in Paris when the Constitution was drafted, and he was not much impressed by its parchment provisions for limited government. So--anticipating the old dictum that "no man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session"--Jefferson added a climatologic backstop. Long, miserable summers were to serve as a natural deterrent to the growth of our national apparatus.

It worked beautifully for more than a century. Legislators, lobbyists, and executive officials fled the capital en masse most summers, right through the late 1920s--when air conditioning was introduced. With the deployment of that subversive technology, there began a notable expansion of the federal leviathan.

Only the Supreme Court has held to the old ways. Having arranged things so that they not only get the last word on policy issues that interest them, but do so on their own time, the justices still knock off for three months every summer.