Daniel Henninger has an excellent column today. His key point:

Congress legislated the system that now exists. Congress planted the seeds back in the ’70s for what is revolting you now with two enactments — the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Both were marketed as reforms.
The first law turned political Washington into a trillion-dollar industry camouflaged as the federal budget. The second ensured that sitting members of Congress and K Street lobbyists would become the entrenched management of that industry. Compared to this, Enron is a kindergarten game.

He concludes thusly:

I don’t see how the Democrats have any practical or ideological incentive to stop the federal government’s inexorable 70-year-long growth. This is what they want — more. For them, the Abramoffs of the world are reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh. By contrast, the Blunt-Boehner-Shadegg fight for the House leadership is an ideological argument over what Republicans should be amid a federal establishment that metastasized after the 1974 changes.
The failed 1974 Budget Act, which released the earmark and spending ghouls, makes clear that some workable form of presidential spending control has to be in the game. Presidential line-item veto power would require a constitutional amendment. Real rescission authority would help, but that has to pass through Congress and maybe a court challenge. Oh gosh, I almost forgot. Unlike from 1960 to 1994, the Republicans control Congress, and arguably all three branches of government. Does that matter? We’ll find out this November and in 2008, when Republicans will either vote or sit.
I wish President Bush would put this issue of what Washington has become into his State of the Union speech Tuesday. My guess is he won’t, recalling what happened when Richard Nixon tried to fight both a major war and the party that controls Congress, which for the foreseeable future looks like it will be the Beltway Spend-and-Collect Party.