The collapse of trust in government in recent years is being thrown into relief by the poll Gallup released last week. By many measures, our trust in government is below where it stood in the months before President Nixon was driven from office. For those who have spent a generation promoting “good government” and “anti-corruption” measures, the results will give cause for pause. How is it that reams of new laws regulating lobbying, campaign contributions, and citizen speech have failed to increase trust in government? Is it because such laws are worthless when it comes to achieving their purported goals? Can they be even worse than useless — that is, actually harmful — when it comes to the goal of fostering an engaged citizenry.

No doubt some will seek to lay blame for the results Gallup has brought in at the feet of President Bush and the Republican Party. They will cite frustration with the war on Islamic terror and the Battle of Iraq and assign to the Bush administration responsibility for the status of both. But that won’t explain what’s happened in respect of the Congress. In each of the last two years, trust in Congress has dropped six points, to 50% rating their trust at least “fair” from 62% in 2005. For one of those years, the Republicans ruled; for the last year, the Democrats have held power. The collapse of trust, it appears, is bipartisan. It is the national governmentfromwhichtrustisebbing. Trust in state and local government, by contrast, stands at 67% and 69%, respectively — a reminder that the best government is close to the people.

It is the federal government that has imposed the most draconian of the good government laws. Could it be that the campaign-finance regulations and other measures have done little but put distance between citizens and the democratic political process? Certainly the reforms have done little to clean up government. Polls from Gallup before the passage of McCain-Feingold showed that despite overwhelming public support for campaign-finance reform (on the order of 70%), few Americans actually expected it to work. Gallup found the number who expected success to be one in four. Americans see how Congress operates even with the new regulations — the financial scandals, the sex scandals, the earmarking, the harshness of the language politicians use toward one another.

People are not fooled by like McCain-Feingold, which aims to silence the critics of government through the force of agencies such as the Federal Election Commission. Congress was never about regulating itself, but always about regulating the speech of those who would dare to criticize incumbent politicians. We are in an era in which citizens need to consult a lawyer before putting up so much as a yard sign, all on account of laws the Congress wrote and the executive enforces. When historians look back on this period, they are going to see it as bizarre. No wonder the only branch of government the people seem to respect anymore is the judiciary. The best way to save this situation is for Justices Roberts et al to pick up the scythe of the First Amendment and cut down the vines of regulation that are sapping the trust of government.