Those with the most resources, whether it be votes, money, or influence, get representatives to create rules that benefit them.

What other stable arrangement can exist? Unless the creators of wealth can keep their wealth, there will be no wealth, which means there will be at best subsistence level production.

The brilliance of the modern capitalist state is mobility. The system is designed to protect the wealthy, but it allows for anyone to become wealthy. Thus, "progress" means the replacement of birth-based class with contribution-based status. We're not there yet, but we have rather consistently been moving toward that outcome.

Mr. Legnard is certainly right about the Democrats' fecklessness. The solution there, though, is actually quite simple to describe (if not to do). The filibuster is the linchpin of Republican obstruction. It needs to be put back in the bottle so that it is difficult to use to block legislation. Can you imagine Mitch organizing a real filibuster to stop the nomination of some assistant secretary so that he can extort some payment from the President?

We can't get rid of the filibuster - too many laws would flip-flop in and out if we did - but the Dems have the chance to make it harder to use. They don't have the will to do that. Maybe they're just waiting their turn to abuse it.

I don't agree with all of Mr. Legnard's to-do list, but I agree with its essence: VOTE for what you care about. Ironically, though, that salutary message is the product of the "awful" rulings of the Supreme Court, the ones that say we should resolve our issues through politics. If we do codify the rule in Roe, the Court will have done us a favor in forcing us to do so.

Of course, codifying Roe means overcoming the filibuster in a way that won't make un-codifying Roe too easy. There's a challenge. The last "real" filibuster was over Civil Rights, and the Senate broke the government (i.e., made the filibuster too easy) in response. How that happened remains a mystery to me. Anyway, fixing the filibuster will change the dynamic inside the Beltway, and, because, I believe in trickle-down comity, I think it will change the dynamic in the land.