Politics & Power Quote by George Will

In George Will's hands, Congress isn’t a deliberative body so much as a legalized smash-and-grab, with a flag pin. The line works because it takes a polite civic ritual - election - and reframes it as tribal deployment: you’re not “representing” constituents, you’re being dispatched to extract spoils for your side. “Looting raid” is deliberately anthropological language, evoking premodern conquest, which is the point: beneath marble columns and C-SPAN, Will suggests the same old patronage instincts run the show.

The specific intent is conservative and structural, not merely scolding. Will is aiming at the incentives of democratic politics: once office becomes a conduit for targeted benefits, rational actors treat lawmaking as resource allocation, not principle. “For one’s friends” is the knife twist. Corruption here doesn’t require envelopes of cash; it thrives in appropriations, carve-outs, regulatory favors, and the endless moral alibi of “bringing home results.” He’s also mocking the way voters participate in the racket, rewarding politicians who deliver localized winnings while denouncing “Washington” in the abstract.

Context matters: Will’s career is steeped in post-Watergate skepticism about government competence, and in late-20th-century fights over pork-barrel spending, earmarks, and interest-group capture. The subtext is that the system doesn’t just tolerate this behavior - it trains it. If public service is graded by how much you can funnel back to your coalition, civic virtue becomes bad strategy, and policy becomes a scoreboard for organized appetites.