Politics & Power Quote by Charley Reese

A good barb works by naming the one disease the doctor refuses to diagnose. Charley Reese’s line lands because it flips Congress’ self-mythology: the institution that sells itself as society’s problem-solver is, in his telling, the primary source of the rot it keeps prescribing for. The jab at “every ill known to man” mimics the grandiosity of modern legislative ambition, then yanks the reader back to a narrower charge: the state’s own overreach and its price tag.

The specific intent is less policy critique than suspicion management. Reese isn’t itemizing programs; he’s framing a habit of governance where solutions must always be external, expansive, and funded, never introspective. “Unconstitutional government” is the loaded phrase doing most of the work. It assumes a prior constitutional baseline and implies that Congress has drifted into a comfortable illegality, protected by complexity, courts, and partisan incentives. Pairing that with “high taxes” tightens the indictment: overreach isn’t abstract, it’s extracted from paychecks.

The subtext is populist, but not naïve. Reese is pointing at the perverse incentive structure: lawmakers can win credit for “curing” visible crises, while the slow-motion crisis of sprawling authority and fiscal appetite is treated as the water we swim in. Context matters too. As a conservative-leaning columnist writing in an era of ballooning federal power, deficits, and culture-war legislation, Reese is channeling a long American tradition: distrust the mechanics of power, especially when power insists it’s acting for your own good. The wit is that the “ill” Congress won’t treat is itself.