Drastic m

Rick Perry has thrown quite the bomb, calling for a greater diminishment of federal power than I've heard from anybody else. Give him credit for being so provocative that it should make even the staunchest libertarians among us question our beliefs:

Blasting the congressional “creatures of Washington” for being overpaid and detached from the struggles of the people outside the Beltway, Texas Gov. and GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry vowed Tuesday to eliminate federal agencies, set term limits for federal judges and push for a part-time Congress where both members' pay and office budgets are sliced in half.

Eliminating some federal agencies, no problem; get rid of Education, Energy and . . . er, uh, well, another department. But whether to make Congress part-time (never gonna happen, for one thing) and eliminate lifetime tenure for federal judges are more problematic. Granted, judges who never have to face the consequences of their actions can and do make some awful decisions. But the reason they have lifetime tenure is to insulate them from the executive and legislative branches, i.e., political considerations. I'm not sure it would be an improvement to remove that protection. Cutting congressional hours and pay might reduce the amount of mischief that body can create, but it would have a lot of other consequences that merit a lot of discussion. For one thing, it would likely make the executive branch even more powerful than it already is.