Can Good Government be Restored?

Three headlines at Real Clear Politics early this morning suggest it will take herculean efforts by a determined Congress to purge political corruption in federal agencies and restore a modicum of good government.

• IRS Lawlessness: 20 Hard Drives, Six Unanswered Questions (IBD) shows how flagrantly the administrative state circumvents accountability.
• The ObamaCare-IRS Nexus (Kim Strassel, WSJ) reveals the depths of political manipulation and corruption to which IRS has already sunk in implementing the Obamacare law.
• Fast-Tracking ObamaCare to the Supreme Court (WSJ) looks at how court packing, judicial jurisdiction manipulation and intimidation may yet be used to rewrite even the most unambiguous texts of the ObamaCare law. 

Congressional investigations uncovering corruption are not enough. Desperately needed is a systemic overhaul of federal laws by Congress to strip federal agencies of the administrative powers that have enabled political corruption to grow into malignancy, as Philip Hamburger argues in Is Administrative Law Unlawful?,  and to restore to the states authority that was originally designed to be theirs, as David Corbin and Matthew Parks argue in Is There Enough Courageous Conservatism: Combating the Arsenal of Progressivism.

Good government can be restored, but only by a reform-minded Congress dedicated to revising existing laws to conform to the principle that the best government is that which governs least.