WASHINGTON DC --Well that certainly was an interesting week. But I’m ready to take responsibility, put the week behind me, and move on to the important business of the nation.

There is something positively sublime about the obsession of the present moment, and it is the way we have found a back door to reclaiming that old Jeffersonian axiom, "That government governs best which governs least." Now, certainly the government has not stopped governing--even if the White House is no longer a functioning organ of government--but we chortled with delight when George Stephanopoulos, struggling mightily to Change The Subject, lamented on ABC’s "This Week" that from Congress we have received "no tobacco bill, no health-care bill, no money for education and teachers, no. . ."

A few more proud achievements like this might make you positively enthusiastic about re-electing this Congress. We have been saying for a long time that the three most welcome words in modern political vocabulary are "Do-Nothing Congress." That’s why we like "gridlock." Now we shall have a Do-Nothing Presidency to go along with it. And if we can find a way to slow up the already molasses-slow judiciary, we will have reached a state of equilibrium that we might be able to live with.

"We suffer most," H.L. Mencken wrote in the 1930s, "when the White House busts with ideas." And when Congress goes along, we might add. Consider that in 1966--an election year--President Lyndon Johnson proposed 113 separate measures in his State of the Union address, everything from Great Society bills, model cities projects, early environmental legislation, supplemental war appropriations, ad infinitum, ad naseum. Congress enacted 97 of these proposals. Even without a distracted presidency, it is unthinkable that today’s Congress would move this much legislation. And that’s not because Congress is controlled by the evil Republicans.

It would be little different if the Speaker’s name was Gephardt. Sound thinkers are understandably disappointed with the current inability of the Republican-led Congress to undo many of the perversities and injustices of current laws and bureaucracy. The entrenched interests of the status quo make reform excruciatingly difficult. But years of strutting by interest groups has contributed to a wide public perception that we have very little to gain from new legislation. Congress can’t even manage to improve the tax code, as anyone who has agonized through the new Schedule D can attest.

So we think it is no coincidence that Congress is receiving its highest public opinion approval ratings in years at the very time when it is doing the least in the way of marquee legislation. At the same time, we see strange things like a "reappraisal" of supposedly mediocre (and scandal-plagued) presidents such as Harding and Grant. At first glance this looks like a pre-emptive attempt to safeguard the Legacy of Bill a generation hence, but we see it as another sign that the tide of opinion is continuing its turn against activist government.

--By Steven Hayward