Politics & Power Quote by Murray Kempton

The line pretends to salute civics-class piety, then twists the knife. "We are a government of laws" is the stock American benediction, the kind of phrase politicians deploy to sound principled without risking anything. Kempton snaps it in half with the follow-up: the law isn’t a shield, it’s a filing cabinet of weapons, and there’s always "some government hack" rifling for the right instrument to "louse up" whoever is already "down". The vulgarity is strategic. It drags lofty constitutional language into the back office, where careers are made on petty enforcement and selective rigor.

Kempton’s specific intent is to puncture the self-congratulatory myth that legality equals justice. He’s not arguing against law as such; he’s arguing against the way law, in practice, becomes a bureaucrat’s alibi. "Hack" signals a system run less by statesmen than by functionaries with incentives: protect the institution, avoid blame, look tough, close the case. The person "who’s down" is doing crucial work here. Law’s harshness is rarely tested on the well-lawyered and well-connected; it’s tested on the already weakened - the poor, the accused, the politically expendable.

The context is mid-century American journalism’s moral x-ray: Kempton covered politics and courts when the rhetoric of order often masked the mechanics of punishment. His cynicism is not fashionable nihilism; it’s reportage distilled into a one-sentence indictment of how procedural correctness can become cruelty with paperwork.