In the '90s Gingrich and his House revolutionaries consolidated that critique and focused it on Congress, assuring us that the place was a ship of fools. Abbie Hoffman couldn't have said it better. That line of thought is now embedded in the national psyche. If people flinched at impeachment this year, it was partly a sign that Washington has been more effectively delegitimized than anybody, left or right, ever dreamed possible. More than that, the whole mad pursuit touched too crudely upon sex.
Privacy is a vexed area of American law.
We know the Bill of Rights marks off certain areas of life. After two centuries we don't know which. Neither does the Supreme Court. In an age of hidden cameras and high tabloid journalism and lawyers for everything, people sense that their lives are in play as never before. And sensing that, they made a judgment this year that political processes are too crude as a means to render judgments on matters as complicated as who touched whom where and why.