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The standard

An ethical standard nobody wrote down is a mood, and a mood cannot be violated in any checkable way. This one is written down, in three places, and all three are public.

1. The founding documents​

The plain-language promises in them: consent of the governed, equality before the law, a government answerable to the people it governs. Whatever else is argued about them, those promises are on the page and they are testable against how the country actually runs.

2. The laws Congress writes for everyone else​

The clearest available statement of what Congress itself says is right. When a body writes a rule for three hundred million people, it has stated a standard — and it has stated it far more precisely than any speech does.

This makes one particular failure very easy to detect: the body exempting itself from the rule it just wrote. No interpretation is needed. The rule exists, the exemption exists, and both are published.

3. The social contract as citizens actually hold it​

Not the version described in a civics textbook — the version people are actually operating on when they say Washington does not work for them. That is the yardstick this site measures against, and it is set down explicitly rather than assumed. See The Social Contract.

When the three disagree, the disagreement is the finding​

This is the useful part. Three written standards give you three ways to be wrong, and every gap between them is a documented, sourced observation rather than an opinion:

  • Founding promise says one thing, statute does another → a constitutional question, argued in public for two centuries and worth arguing again.
  • Statute says one thing, the body exempts itself → the exemption is the whole finding, and it needs no further interpretation.
  • Everything is formally in order and citizens do not believe a word of it → the gap is between the written contract and the lived one, which is the most important of the three and the one nobody measures.

Misalignment is not the same as disagreement​

A citizen who wants a different policy is disagreeing. A system that produces outcomes nobody selected, that survives elections meant to change it, is misaligned — a different thing, with a different remedy. The distinction is drawn in Misalignment vs disagreement and it runs under everything in this area.

Also in this area​

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