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Willravel, that is my point exactly. Why do you say "precedent says otherwise?" The precedents you cite support my point precisely: the more control government has over people, the more chances it has to be corrupt. That's my point.
Divided government has been the norm in the US for the past 50 or so years. During my conscious lifetime, we had single party govt only for the four years of Carter, the first two years of Clinton and the middle four years of Bush. People tend to like it that way. And if you look back at the Federalist Papers, Hamilton and Madison designed the constitution with the specific idea that it has to be hard to get things done, and that without a fairly high degree of consensus, gridlock is a good thing because it prevents majorities from running roughshod. That's not necessarily a partisan thing, either - if you recall, the Dem-controlled Senate killed off Clinton's health plan.
But divided government is just as susceptible to corruption as nondivided - it just is less likely to happen at the legislative level. My point is that if you give the government a lot of tasks, the people who work in the government have more opportunities for corruption. If the government does only a few discrete tasks, there are fewer opportunities for those tasks to get corrupted.
To put it another way: it's bad enough we have $600 toilet seats in the military. We don't need to also get them in day care centers and bus stations.
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