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" Because, as it once was said, Washington is actually a swamp that traded malaria for politics and got the worst of the deal, the month of August is when the city goes to the dogs and the tourists. Congress flees to the hinterlands. The president goes off to the golf course, which is on Martha&amp;#039;s Vineyard this year. The Supreme Court ascends to Olympus to watch Clarence Thomas do cannonballs into the wading pool. And even the lobbyists blow town and drink their nightly cocktails made of oil and human blood on cool porches overlooking the ocean, and not at a table on the stifling sidewalk along K Street. What is left in Washington are the monuments, and, I will tell you, when the government&amp;#039;s on vacation and all that&amp;#039;s left is the glistening marble and the age-darkened bronze, democracy looks like a helluva deal. I often wonder about that. How do you walk past Thomas Jefferson in his temple there on the tidal basin on your way to cut a crooked energy deal? How do you walk past Martin Luther King, Jr. glowering knowingly across the tidal basin at Jefferson, when you know that the only reason you&amp;#039;re in Congress is that you got your district gerrymandered into being solidly Caucasian, and then suppressed the votes of the remaining blacks through some sort of new ID law? Don&amp;#039;t you feel at some level like someone who came to town to burglarize a cathedral and pawn the candlesticks for drug money? This year is different, however, because the centers of real power are located in the states -- specifically, in those states where Republican-majority legislatures and Republican governors have colluded to radically change the nature of democracy not only in their states, but in Washington as well. A spate of voter-suppression laws, erupting after the Supreme Court&amp;#039;s indefensible gutting of the Voting Rights Act, has spread far from the states of the old Confederacy. They&amp;#039;ve even popped up in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well. Many of these same legislatures have passed restrictions on a woman&amp;#039;s right to privacy that seem to fly in the face of common decency and existing legal precedent. The hope, obviously, is that one of them will get all the way through to the Supreme Court, and God alone knows what the court will do then. But that&amp;#039;s not even the worst of it. Because the Republican majorities in the state legislatures -- the ones who are passing these laws, and often by overwhelming margins\u2014contain the next generation of Republican politicians who will be coming to Washington. They are the farm teams. Anyone who is counting on the conservative fever &amp;quot;breaking,&amp;quot; and the subsequent descent of cool reason upon the national government, should not stand on one leg waiting for it. These are the people who will come to this now-quiet town one day a few years from now. They will walk among its monuments, and think they are honoring democracy by destroying it from within. Their hearts will soar when they look at the marble. And then they will go to work, and the spirit in the gleaming stone will soften and crumble away. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24387/washington-monuments-082113/>