John Brummett makes a point worth considering: Do we do ourselves any favor by establishing independent public agencies to safely sequester them from the supposed evils of political influence?
Like the Game and Fish Commission.
Like the Arkansas Lottery.
Like the Little Rock National Airport.
Are power grabs, poor bookkeeping and crazily self-interested spending a healthy thing? Brummett concludes:
I am tilting at a windmill, of course. Nothing about this will get changed. Any serious effort to repeal independence in any of these cases would be met with dire warnings of horrid political repercussion.
But it cannot hurt every once in a while for someone to point out that we forfeit public accountability when we distance government from electoral politics — and that, by the way, we indict only ourselves when we say we do not trust the competence or integrity of the people we elect.